[thelist] MSIE, applets and classid

[Brent Eades]

I'm finally updating my personal site to be XHTML/web 
standards-compliant. One section of the site contains Java 'panorama' 
applets (created with the old IBM HotMedia toolkit, if anyone remembers 
that.)

Anyway, I'm a little confused as to my options for embedding these 
applets in MSIE using the <object> tag.

The Sun site seems to be telling me that I have to declare one of two 
'classid' values:

classid="clsid:8AD9C840-044E-11D1-B3E9-00805F499D93" ('dynamic')

classid="clsid:CAFEEFAC-0014-0000-0000-ABCDEFFEDCBA" ('static')

... and optionally a codebase value, which prompts a download of a given 
version of the Java runtime.

Either way, I seem to end up with undesirable results in MSIE. (I should 
stress that these applets are pretty old, and seem to run OK with just 
about any version of the runtime released in the past five or six years.)

If I go with the 'static' classid, then MSIE users who have older 
versions of the runtime are prompted to download a newer version (which 
isn't really necessary); if I use the 'dynamic' version, those users 
will get confusing warning messages about a 'version collission' (sic), 
and the need to close the 'netscape browser' (also sic).  (Though if 
they click through the prompts they do eventually see the applet.)

Is there any way, using <object> in MSIE, to simply say "if the user is 
using *any* version of the JRE, go ahead and load the applet", it should 
be fine"? This is essentially how things behave with the old <applet> 
tag, but that of course has been deprecated and doesn't validate in XHTML.

For reference, here's one of the old pages containing the applet:

http://almonte.com/aerial_java.html

-- 
Brent Eades	
Almonte, Ontario
http://almonte.com