On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 09:23:16AM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
> Robin Szemeti wrote:
> >
> > now I am absolutely totally 100% certain that some web browser (and thats
> > all it is) should *not* mess around with the way I view folders. I think
> > that was a turning point for me and my judgement is probably clouded and
>
> No, no, no, that's _not_ all it is. IE is a set of distributed objects
> that between them handle those things that you might want to do related
> to HTTP and the rendering of HTML and assocciated technologies. That's
> MUCH more than just a browser.
>
> Once IE is installed on your system it becomes relatively simple to make
> an excel spreadsheet where some cell has a value that is the result of
> an HTTP request. This is not something AFAIK that Opera or Netscape do.
> I think Mozilla is trying to be more like this, but I never use it so I
> don't know. I do know that Mozilla appears to be just as 'lightweight'
> as IE.
>
> The tragedy is that all these great objects and classes tend to be only
> accessible from inside stuff like VBA or VB or MSVC++. Maybe Perl's DCOM
> bindings on Win32 are robust enough now that I can use perl to script
> the IE objects, I don't know.
It's pretty easily manageable from within Python, last time that I
looked, and it should work pretty well inside Perl, too.
Mozilla will be nice and able to do all this, it's basically reimplemented
COM as XPCOM for its own use. Which is all very well and good, but
there's no easy way (yet) to get at XPCOM from outside of mozilla.
ActiveState are working on this, though and there was a recent
announcement about Perl/Python XPCOM integration being available as a
preview release. Probably worth checking out...
-Dom
