Overview

Summary

Research which plugins could be used for different browsers on MacOSX

Count

1

Label

Research

Short Description

We like to add more mimetypes to the EmbedObject macro and thus we need to know which plugins could be used on different platforms.

Browser plugins do have very different parameters. For a major mimetype like "video" common parameters for a browser plugin are "play", "stop", "repeat". For some embedded video player plugins there might be much more parameters needed.

You have to deliver a list of browser plugins for 5 different popular mimetypes (which moin does not support yet) that can be used with two of these browsers: firefox, opera, internet explorer, safari, konqueror.

The list has to cover different major mimetypes from: application, audio, image, model, text, video, x-world.

You have to describe which plugin for which mimetype / which browser you used and where to get it. Please indicate for which platforms (mac, windows, linux) this plugin is available. If a plugin has parameters to control it you should show some html code using these parameters. (see documentation at http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.3.2)

Mimetypes include:

application

ms products, ogg, pdf, postscript, rtf, vnd.oasis.opendocument, x-abiword, x-kpresenter, x-kspread, x-kword

audio

basic, midi, mpeg, x-ms-wma, x-realaudio, x-pn-realaudio, x-wav

image

tiff, svg, svg-xml

model

vrml, iges, mes

text

calendar, csv, richtext, rtf, x-vcalendar, x-vcard

video

fli, mpeg, quicktime, x-ms*, mp4,

x-world

x-vrml

We estimate that this task takes 10h work time and you must complete it within 10 days.

Detailed Description

See http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ for a list of mimetypes (an easier word for mimetype is "file format").

Browsers have built-in support only for a few mimetypes (e.g. text/html, text/plain, image/png), but can use plugins for many other mimetypes.

For example, if you like to hear some background music while reading a web page, you might need a plugin which is able to play an ogg file (mimetype application/ogg) or, if the web page offers a mp3 file, you need plugin support for mimetype audio/mpeg.

As a first step, you have to classify what mimetypes are popular for Audio, Image, Movie, Text, etc. and check if moin already supports them.

The next step is to search what plugins do exist for browsers (choose 2 from firefox, opera, internet explorer, safari, konqueror).

If a plugin provides controls, we are very interested to get shown how they are used in some lines of html code using the '<object>` tag. Alternatively, you can extend the current macro EmbedObject.py to generate that html.

Submission

[1] Browsers Tested: Safari 3.0.4 (523.12.2), Firefox 3.0 Beta 2

[2] Taken from: http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/mozilla/vlc.r

[3] Untested, due to low avalibility of RealMedia files. Should work though

Small rule of thumb of sorts I have noticed, if the media file isn't supported on the list above, it's probably supported by Quicktime - especially if it is audio or video. Quicktime's usage information can be found at: "http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/embed.html"

Safari will open .pdf and .tiff without needing a plugin. Firefox will not open .tiff and I could not find a plugin. The best way to solve this is to have it download and open in Preview or another image program. Likewise for .pdf, Firefox won't open in browser but will instead download and open with Adobe Reader. Alternatley, there is PDF Browser Plugin (see above in table).

I could not locate a vrml plugin for Safari. Cortona for Firefox is above.

As for odt and ps... the information I found was conflicting but regardless if the file is not able to be viewed it will almost always be able to download and be opened externally. Althought not ideal, this is often the case and is normal.

Safari and Firefox both will play midi and quicktime without plugins as long as the machine is running OS X.

I noticed SVG images were mentioned, and they are supported, as are most image formats, on all the browsers I tested without plugins. I also think that most text formats are supported by these browsers.

As for x-world I do not know about plugins for this. Most other things (like v-cards etc) are supported by external applications that either come with Mac OS X or are free. For example, Address Book which comes with OS X, will manipulate v-card files.

Plugins I could not find: chemical/x-pdb - Noticed this MIME type in EmbedObject.py and looked for the plugin, could not find for anything other then for Netscape 4.75.

Although slightly outdated, this website provides some more information about plugins, mime types, and various browsers for OS X.

Note: Credit to jitterb...@mac.com for the preliminary research and work that went into this task.

Discussion