Browser plugins

[David Boddie]

"Aurélien Géron" <ageron at videotron.ca> wrote in message news:<bfdst8$2je$1 at apollon.grec.isp.9tel.net>...

> I'd like to write a simple portable browser plugin for Internet Explorer,
> Netscape and if possible other navigators too. Is there a way to do that
> using Python?  For now I'd like to develop something like the GoogleBar, but
> I'd also like to know how to develop "in-frame" plugins such as Flash or
> Realplayer.

This would be a cool thing to be able to do but, as you can see from
your researches, if it was really easy then it would have been done
already.

> I searched comp.python.com history but all I came across was someone saying
> "why would you want to write Browser Plugins in the first place?".  A kind
> of disguised "don't know" if you ask me.
> I then looked on www.python.org but I soon found myself on ActiveX pages: I
> would hate to go that way because it seems neither simple nor portable.

There have been some discussions in the past about this. Searching
Google Groups using "Netscape plugin group:comp.lang.python" manages
to yield some results such as

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=mailman.1036701490.23212.python-list%40python.org&rnum=3&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DNetscape%2Bplugin%2Bgroup:comp.lang.python%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26scoring%3Dd%26selm%3Dmailman.1036701490.23212.python-list%2540python.org%26rnum%3D3

but the further back in time one looks, the less relevant the
references are.

> Any ideas?  Any links to documentation for browser plugins development?  Any
> code examples or open source project I could check out?

I tried embedding Python in a simple wrapper library to use with
Mozilla and Konqueror but found that it eventually came down to
passing events through to the toolkit that you want to use for the
plugin GUI. I didn't have any experience of this at the time so I
abandoned the project. However, most of the simple stuff, like
returning MIME types and plugin details was fairly straightforward.

I've no idea how you'd go about writing Python plugins for Internet
Explorer. If only it supported Netscape plugins...

Good luck, anyway!

David
-- 
davidb at mcs.st-and.ac.uk is not my real address.