Power of htc

From Scott Galloway:

Reading this post from Stephen Sharrock reminded me about something I often overlook, the phenomenally powerful DHTML behaviours which IE supports using HTC files. The WebService behaviour for instance lets you pull information into your client from aribtrary web services, even without using HTCs, tools like xLoadTree provide the ability to load data straight into the client without forcing a postback.
Before anyone comments, I know these are IE only - to be honest I don't care, when only 3% of users use anything other than IE, it seems a shame to ignore the functional improvements these kind of tools provide.
Now, Mozilla does support it's own version using XBL and XUL - hopefully some genius will work out a way for mozilla to support full HTC as well...

Scott it could be a good idea to find or to create a page with all the .htc files existing around.

9 Comments

  • There's a fair few of them, if you follow the link to the Web service one, you can see all the MS provided ones - if anyone wants to make such a page it would be cool!

  • XAML can be thought of as the next logical progression of the behaviors technology, and it is partially the reason why the XUL folks get so upset over XAML.



    DonXML Demsak

  • XUL is pretty interesting, Don, do you think a XUL - XAML convertor would be possible?

  • Oh, and before anyone mentions the stats I posted (not that I'm getting paranoid :-)), I am well aware that it's 6% for other browsers, not 3%.

  • well Scott this percentage can be discuss, roughly I can say between 1% to 10% ;-)

  • Also Scott for the part where you mention if Mozila could support htc. Well I think because it's mostly DHTML, it should be possible IMHO to adapt the htc as a standalone javascript library, no ?

  • I think Slashdot is confusing Mozilla with Mozarella ;-)

  • I am not a "Anti MS" nor stupid but I only use IE when it is required (due to bad/lazy decisions on the part of the developer) and in SharpReader (because it is used at the embedded browser). Firebird is a better browser than Internet Explorer AND it is still being improved. If Internet Explorer wasn't dead I would probably use it, but at this point, only security-related or court-ordered bugs are being fixed instead of long-standing bugs that other browsers don't have.

  • I am trying to learn how to call a web service using javascript only (i.e. no Java, no ActiveX, no proprietary Microsoft HTTP or XML DLLs). The approach should be browser-agnostic and OS-independent. I've found articles on how to do this using proprietary Microsoft libraries and behaviors, but nothing so far that is "generic".

    Is this possible in June 2004? How to build the SOAP request in Javascript, send it via HTTP to the service, and then parse the XML returned by the service?

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