Macromedia Dreamweaver- Getting information about MIME types and plugins

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Getting information about MIME types and plugins

Only Navigator 3.0 and later support the plugins and mimeTypes properties of the navigator object. If you open the example file in IE 3, the page displays "If you were using Netscape 3.0 or later, you would see a list of installed plugins here" and "If you were using Netscape 3.0 or later, you would see a list of MIME types supported by the browser here" in place of the plugins and MIME types lists. This is because the JavaScript in the example file checks to see if the browser even supports plugins and mimeTypes before looking up their properties ( name , description , etc.):


	<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> if (navigator.plugins){ document.write('We\'re good to go!'); } else{ document.write('This browser won\'t tell us anything about the installed plugins.'); } </SCRIPT>

If you open the sample in IE 4, you'll see "The following plugins are installed in this browser" and "This browser supports the following MIME types either on its own or with helper apps or plugins," but no list of plugins or MIME types. The fact that you see these statements but don't see the lists of MIME types and plugins means that the plugins and mimeTypes properties are implemented but nonfunctional.

To get around this difficulty, you could decide that because the check for specific plugins and MIME types works only on Netscape 3 and later, you'll check for navigator.appName == 'Netscape' && parseFloat(navigator.appVersion) >= 3 before proceeding with checks for particular plugins or MIME types.