> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Jeremy Dunck
> Sent: 25 May, 2005 14:56
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] browser toolbars
>
> On 5/25/05, Houghton,Andrew <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ...
> >So
> > in reality, all you need to know is HTML and possibly a  little
> >JavaScript.
>
> Yes, the point in my original email was to give some
> documentation, but also show that there wasn't much dev
> community around it.
>

Hmm... actually I think you mean there isn't much *published* in
the dev community.  When I look at my IE search bar options I see
MSN Search, Yahoo!, Overture, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Euroseek,
and InfoSpace.  These are organizations that used those Web pages
you mentioned to extend IE.  Yet, the only thing they published
about it was probably a press release.

Commercial organization rarely publish on this sort of information.
In contrast, the open source community *publishes* on everything from
the truly insignificant, to extremely popular, to thought provoking.
That's a complement to those who do publish since publishing any
information is useful for all levels developers from beginners to
experts.  After all isn't open source development really about
*community*.

The point here is that you cannot judge whether there is or isn't a
development community by the lack of published information.  Business,
rarely publish to avoid giving away product strategy or information
about development efforts to their competitors.  IMHO, you have to
be careful about equating documentation vs. community.  However, the
converse, if there is a wealth of documentation, then there must be a
strong development community is probably a reasonable assumption.

> I don't understand how the target attribute (which I'm
> familiar with) is useful in the context of toolbars...

Actually, I didn't mis-paste the URL, but after going back to the
original post by Eric Morgan, I realized that I read "toolbar" as
"browser bar".  You can create either in IE, and Yahoo!, for
example, has implemented both, hence my confusion.  Toolbars are
generally at the top in IE, but IE allows them to be placed on
any side of the browser.  Browser bars integrate on the left side
of IE.  You can access IE browser bars by using View->Explorer Bar.
In FireFox and Opera, I think, they call them panels.  Sorry for
the confusion.

If you are developing a browser bar you can use the HTML anchor
tag's target attribute with a value of _search.  The href attribute
will point to the URL of the Web page you wish to display.  This
provides a "zero deploy" situation.  Of course in IE v6 with SP2
installed this now produces a security popup event, so its value
has diminished somewhat.

I created a quick demo, in just a few minutes, for people to see
what I'm talking about.  You can find it here:

http://staff.oclc.org/~houghtoa/public/iebar-test.htm

You can use view source to see the contents of the files.  Believe
me there is nothing earth shattering going on... Your imagination
is the limit.


Andy.

Andrew Houghton, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
http://www.oclc.org/about/
http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/houghton.htm