http://devedge.netscape.com/central/plugins/ Recent additions to DevEdge Plugins Central Thu, 16 Jan 2003 3:43:51 GMT 2000-2003 Netscape Communications http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/scripting-flash/ <p>This article is about the interaction between JavaScript in a webpage and multimedia plugins such as Flash. For a more introductory article on plugins and Netscape Gecko browsers, read the <a href="http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/gecko-plugins/">plugin overview</a>. </p> <p> Often, websites use JavaScript to communicate with multimedia plugins such as Macromedia's Flash player. Using JavaScript to communicate with plugins allows developers to take advantage of both DHTML and multimedia to create compelling new user experiences. JavaScript can be used to toggle the plugin's features, allowing the creation of custom controls in DHTML to manipulate a media player. Similarly, the plugin can also make invocations into a web page's JavaScript methods, allowing the web page to be completely aware of events taking place within the multimedia plugin. This allows for tight integration between the classic elements of a web page -- JavaScript and HTML -- and the multimedia world of the plugin -- animations, video, and audio. In Netscape Gecko browsers, recent versions of the Flash Plugin allow this kind of JavaScript-to-plugin communication, as well as the plugin-to-JavaScript communication. This article uses Flash as a case study to show developers the kinds of things they can do using scriptability, and mentions the other plugins you can script in Netscape Gecko browsers. Links to the developer documentation of these other plugins can be found in the <a href="#others">section on other plugins</a>. </p> http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2001/ms-wmp/ Windows Media Player can be made to work in Netscape Gecko-based browsers like Netscape 6.x/7.x as both a plugin (embedded inside the browser via the HTML 'embed' tag) and a helper application (outside the context of the browser), with a few important caveats. Netscape recommends the Microsoft Windows Media Player 7.1 installer, which recognizes Netscape 6+ as well as the other browsers on a user's system. http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/cursor/