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  The Dynamic Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 Dynamic HTML One of IE 4's new additions is support for Dynamic HTML. With it, Microsoft is hoping the browser will do more and depend less on the server. Dynamic HTML lets you add more intelligence to the client side. Events (such as mouse movements) or actions (sorting a data list) do not need to be relayed to the server. In Microsoft's lingo, those extensions are known as object model, 2-D positioning, data binding and dynamic HTML multimedia contents. Your HTML page becomes an object (as in object-oriented programming) that does not depend on the Web server to provide new, exciting functionality. W ith more processing within IE (and fewer returns to the Web server), you get faster access to dynamic HTML-enabled sites. IE's support for dynamic HTML is not compatible with Communicator's support. Netscape has a demo on its Web site for some of the Dynamic HTML features that Communicator 4 supports, and you can't load that page using IE 4. Netscape Communicator does not support Microsoft's scriptable ActiveX multimedia controls because IE4 does not support layer tag extension. As with the new Netscape Communicator suite, IE 4 comes with a full suite of its own applications. In addition to the browser, it's bundled with Outlook Express, a one-stop shop for e-mail and news reading. Outlook Express recognizes IMAP4, POP3 and SMTP e-mail protocols, so it can communicate with the majority of e-mail servers on the Internet. It supports the Internet News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), which lets you read UseNet newsgroups. It has a friendly and powerful interface that looks the same whether you are reading e- mail or posting a news message. You can manage folders with ease; e-mail filters let you automatically route e-mail messages with headers, matching your specifications to folders of your choice. The HTML support is superb--especially handy for me because half of the e-mail messages I receive are loaded with HTML content. The complete IE 4 installation includes NetMeeting and NetShow. Microsoft NetMeeting is a network conferencing tool that supports audio, video, text chatting and data transfer. You can use any video capture board and camera supported by Windows to hold live meetings over the Internet. The NetShow client lets you view streamlined audio and video, which are served by NetShow servers. NetShow server (available separately from Microsoft) provides streaming audio and video over the Internet. IE 4's installation comes in three flavors: standard, enhanced and full installation. Full installation comes with everything, while the enhanced version does not download and install NetShow or NetMeeting . Webcasting Microsoft enters the Web "push/pull" arena with Webcasting. In this paradigm, you subscribe to premium channel providers. The Internet contents are delivered to your desktop in the background from those premium channels. You can customize download frequencies and quantities. Beyond enhancing the browser 's functionality and adding more components, the browser war is concentrating on the Webcasting versus Netcasting issue. It's the same idea with two names. At press time, neither component was available in a format for me to issue a verdict. But once they are ready, you should be able to capitalize on their huge technological advancements. You'll be able to concentrate more on productivity and less on hunting for information on the Internet. Bottom Line If you're a Windows-only shop, you should seriously consider IE 4. If you have a mix of Windows and Unix workstations, and you opt for uniformity, you should think about Netscape Communicator. Ahmad Abualsamid is a server systems engineer at Epic Systems Corp. and a doctoral student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He can be reached at sami@maf.wisc.edu |
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by Ahmad Abualsamid Sailing Along With BreezeNet Pro's Adapters by Joel Conover Sphericall Redefines Voice Networking by David Willis Updated June 27, 1997 |
