This hour introduces the two types of interactive programming that are easiest to add to your Web site: Java applets, and ActiveX controls. You don't get enough technical stuff in this short hour to write your own programs, but you do learn the basic HTML to insert prewritten ones into your Web pages. You also see how to use an ActiveX control to embed video in a page, and how to combine that with what you learned in Hour 16: Embedding Multimedia in Web Pages for maximum compatibility.
(View HTML tags covered in Hour 17.)
Oh Happy Day(Figures 17.1 - 17.2)
Java applets are pre-written programs that you place on your Web page with the <APPLET> tag. The tag is used to supply any information that an applet needs. The NAME identifies what information you're supplying to the applet, and VALUE is the actual information itself. In this example, the RnbText applet is designed to display some text, so you have to tell it what text to display. The Bounce applet doesn't require any <PARAM> tag.
ActiveX Label Control(Figures 17.3 - 17.4)
The <OBJECT> tag on this page embeds an ActiveX control.You can use any label you want for the ID attribute, but you'll need to rely on the person who wrote the ActiveX control (or an automated Web page authoring tool) to tell you the correct CLASSID.
Fractal Video Clip II(Figures 17.5 - 17.6)
You can use the Microsoft ActiveMovie control to play a video with the <OBJECT> tag shown here. An <EMBED> tag is also included in this example for compatibility with Netscape Navigator.
You can use the same applet more than once on a page. This is quite efficient, because it will only need to be downloaded once, and the Web browser will then create two copies of it automatically.
"The <APPLET> tag is officially obsolete... However, most people are still using earlier versions of Web browsers that require the <APPLET> tag, and the current versions of both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer still support <APPLET>. So you should continue to use <APPLET> until all of your intended audience switches to HTML 4 compatible browsers--which isn't likely to happen for quite some time."
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