Jmol failed, displaying as a white rectangle with a little red X in the upper left corner. No error message appeared. In this IE there is no "Microsoft VM" section in Advanced under Internet Options under Tools.
Thus, consistent with Miguel Howard's message to Jaime Prilusky on jmol-users 3/10/04, it appears that all Windows XP users will need to install Sun's JVM before they can use Jmol at all.
Can we devise a more graceful way to inform users of Jmol sites, whose computer lack a JVM, that they need to install the JVM from java.com? Rather than giving them the impression that (any) Jmol site simply "doesn't work"? (Most users of my websites are students, educators, and researchers who are sophisticated in molecular biology, but not in computer technology.)
1. Is it possible to detect the absence of any JVM using javascript within IE?
or
2. Can the Jmol embed tag itself be configured to do something "graceful" in the absence of a JVM?
Unfortunately, this situation is comparable to the need to install Chime for Chime sites, which dissuades over two thirds of visitors to Chime sites from ever using them -- even when the link for downloading the installer is offered.
And, unfortunately, the vast majority of potential Jmol users are Windows users. The sitemeter at the bottom of the FrontDoor page of proteinexplorer.org reports that of the 275,000 visitors for the last 1.7 years, 84% were using Windows (3% NT, 18% Win98, 22% Win2000, 41% WinXP). 63% used IE 6, 6% IE5, 19% Netscape 4, and 11% "Netscape 5". For the 11,000 most recent visits in March 2004, 89% used Windows and 78% used IE.
[It goes without saying that the other huge benefits of Jmol (open source, cross platform, cross browser, active development, better capabilities) put it way out in front of MDL Chime, despite this setback engineered by Microsoft.]
-Eric Martz
/* - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Protein Explorer - 3D Visualization: http://proteinexplorer.org Workshops: http://www.umass.edu/molvis/workshop World Index of Molecular Visualization Resources: http://molvisindex.org ConSurf - Find Conserved Patches in Proteins: http://consurf.tau.ac.il Atlas of Macromolecules: http://molvis.sdsc.edu/atlas/atlas.htm PDB Lite Macromolecule Finder: http://pdblite.org Molecular Visualization EMail List: http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/raslist.htm
Eric Martz, Professor Emeritus, Dept Microbiology
U Mass, Amherst MA US 413-545-2325/FAX 413-545-2532
http://www.umass.edu/molvis/martz
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