[thelist] RE: Acrobat detection

Chris Blessing webguy at mail.rit.edu
Tue Dec 18 16:58:06 CST 2001


It is a basic script for sure, good call on the versioning and what-not.
Fortunately for me (being that I have extremely limited time to get things
done now-a-days) it works for us in our situation. ;)

Chris Blessing
webguy at mail.rit.edu
http://www.330i.net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of John Dowdell
> Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 5:52 PM
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: Re: [thelist] RE: Acrobat detection
>
>
> Try checking for tights. Sometimes sequins and rhinestones are a giveaway,
> but they *always* wear tights....
>
> ... oh, you meant *Adobe* Acrobat, sorry.... ;-)
>
> That routine you provided looks like it will work for many situations.
> IE/Mac can be a little funny there, though, because some versions
> balk when
> they see VBScript, and earlier versions don't offer a navigator.plugins
> array. (I'm not sure why that compound boolean test in the VBScript block
> is needed, because most browsers just ignore scripting languages
> they don't
> understand.) Then there's Opera, Mozilla, and other environments.
>
> Even if this works in a particular browser, however, it doesn't help with
> version-detection... according to Media Metrix, 71% of consumers tested
> earlier this month could see *some* Acrobat content without installing
> anything new, but on these larger plugins people tend not to upgrade as
> often as on the smaller plugins... look particularly at the version
> differences between Flash and Shockwave for a parallel:

<snip>

Perhaps use that script you have, to help at least some folks, but realize
it won't help all of them, and provide a link for "If you can't see this,
get Acrobat here?" That may be a way to beat the browser differences and
version-detection issues....?

jd





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