Positioned Elements and OS Controls, Applets and Plug-ins

Built-in Plug-ins

NS4 shipped with its own Live Audio and Live Video plug-ins. Explorer for Windows relies on the Windows Media Player as its default media player.

If you install a third-party plug-in, with similar capabilities, like Apple's QuickTime, for example, it may register itself as the default media player. In Explorer, you can force the built-in Media Player to kick-in by using the <OBJECT> tag and the relevant CLASSID.

Manipulating plug-ins, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

The above introduction was necessary, however, since the two media items included in this page will not always be played by the built-in players. The result you get depends on the third-party plug-ins you have installed, and how you have registered them.

Audio

You should have audio controls for a "click" sound in the table below. Pass the bordered positioned element above over the controls. Both browsers have a persistence problem.

Type	HTML	Problem in...
.au file	<EMBED SRC="click.au">	NS4.x NS6.x IE4.x* IE5.x* IE6.x* Opera	NS4.x IE4.x IE5.x
Renders as...

Note:

* IE for Windows may-or-may-not display a persistence problem. If a third-party plug-in is used there will be a persistence problem. If the Media Player is used, then it depends on the version of the plug-in. Old versions (such as those that existed when this article was first written) had problems. Newer versions do not. HTML elements float above them.

Video

For the video example, we have used the sample .mov that ships with the QuickTime download, which, of course, is copyright by the Apple Computer Corporation, but freely available. Again, the peristence problem will manifest itself depending on the player used.

Type	HTML	Problem in...
.mov file	<EMBED SRC="Sample.mov">	NS4.x NS6.x IE4.x* IE5.x* IE6.x* Opera	NS4.x IE4.x IE5.x
Renders as...

Note:

* As above.

In the interests of simplicity and cross-browser compatibility, we have used the EMBED tag in the examples. HTML4 insists on the use of the OBJECT tag, not supported by NS4.

On the next page, we'll use a Java applet as an example. And, yes, those of you using NS4 will get the dreaded "Starting Java...." message.