Workaround for .htc for Macs

May 4, 2004 12:56 PM

I'm in a bit of a pickle - the developers of a website I work on have used HTML Components (.htc) to drive the dynamic portion of the site. User testing revealed that it's working on Windows with IE 5.5 and above, but it's not working on any of the Macs we're used, which are running OS 9 and OS X, and have IE 5, Netscape and Safari browsers.

Short of re-coding the entire user interface, does anyone know of a workaround for our friends on Macs?
posted by pjhagop to computers & internet (6 comments total)

you could rewrite the htc as javacsript. that's not recoding the full interface, but implies a fair amount of work (i've never seen htc before, but after a minute's look replacing with javascript doesn't seem that hard - however, i'm having a hard time googling for automated translation).
posted by andrew cooke at 1:43 PM on May 4, 2004

(so in case it's not obvious from my one minute comment, that's just a wild guess)
posted by andrew cooke at 1:47 PM on May 4, 2004

.htc behavior files are IE5+ on a PC only (AFAIK). You'd have to rewrite in JavaScript and you'd have to accept the possibility of some loss of functionality/ looks. Behavior files are a pretty cool idea, but without a web standard behind them, what a dangerous thing to use.
posted by yerfatma at 2:27 PM on May 4, 2004

.htc behavior files are IE5+ on a PC only (AFAIK).

True.

Also, if you're using HTC to do things that would normally be "sandboxed" away from the browser (like local filesystem access, reading data from across domains, etc.) you may have to dump that functionality completely. Those operations require certain permissions that the brower may or may not be capable of granting, if they have an exposed API for it at all.
posted by scottandrew at 2:32 PM on May 4, 2004

And the developers should have realized all of this well before it got to user testing.
posted by sad_otter at 5:26 PM on May 4, 2004

surely they would have known. sounds like a communication problem at a higher level to me.... </wild speculation>
posted by andrew cooke at 6:27 AM on May 5, 2004