Re: LYNX-DEV Re: lynx and java

[David Woolley]

> 
> On Fri, 19 Dec 1997 address@hidden wrote:
> 
> :It seems a shame that lynx doesn't seem to support Java
> :when adding java support woulf prabably take no more than
> :15 minutes of programming. All you would have to do is show

Nothing, except "Hello World" ever takes this little time!

> :the applet tags just as you now do for anchors, and then if
> :someone clicks on an applet, call up the JDK appletviewer somewhat
> :like you now use xv to view jpeg.

That will work if:

- you are running on a platform that supports appletviewer (e.g. not DOS,
  not command line Unix, and I think some Windows that support Lynx may
  need a GUI browser installed first);
- there is only one applet on the page (I'm not sure what happens for 
  multiple ones, but I'm sure the context won't be displayed);
- the applet doesn't try to communicate with applets in other frames (this
  can be done to keep the main body of the code preloaded);
- you don't want to discriminate between different potential sources of
  applets.

With the above restrictions, excepting that the site vetting would not be
an issue, you could run appletviewer by using a print method that detects
the base URL from the start of the file and invokes appletviewer on that
URL (NB not on the file, as that would mess up the security policy - this,
unfortunately, does mean the page will be refetched).  In the unlikely
event that the page is well designed, you should be able to detect the
applet from the fallback text.

However I think what most people are working on isn't Java, but
Javascript, which is not susceptible to this sort of approach.  Javascript
seems to be causing most of the current problems, but support for all the
latest tricks ("dynamic HTML") would probably require Lynx's internal
structure to be modified to resemble that of MSIE.