Posted by Spartanicus on 08/03/05 16:21

bunch92 <bunch92@yahoo.fr> wrote:

>Following your advice on a previous post, I coded the following to play
>a WAV sound :
>
><a href="http://site/file.wav">listen</a>
>
>
>It behaves differently om my 2 PCs.
>On PC1 (GOOD) , it opens my sound application, plays the sound, and the
>HTML page stays the same
>On PC2,(BAD) it uses Quicktime, plays the sound, but my HTML page is
>changed to a Quicktime player !!!
>
>I tried :
>
><a href="http://site/file.wav" target="blank">listen</a>
>
>On PC1 (BAD), it opens a new blank page (annoying), plays the sound, and
>the original HTML page stays the same
>On PC2 (GOOD), it opens a new page with Quicktime, plays the sound, and
>my original HTML page stays the same
>
>
>Is there a way to code the above so that both PCs have consistent
>results ? I don't want to change the PC configs as my site could be
>accessed with PC1 type users or PC2 type users.

You've still not grasped the nettle, users use different browsers, they
configure those browsers differently, they may use certain plugins, or
not, or they may have certain media players, or not. You cannot control
any of this. It's your responsibility to present the content properly,
from there on it's the user's responsibility.

Quicktime is a particularly nasty piece of work, it aggressively
attempts to seize control over all media types that it supports, across
all applications that it supports. It's know to change content type
handlers from applications that natively support the content to
Quicktime. This can for example result in pngs opening in Quicktime
instead of the browser.

You cannot force what happens on a user's system, attempting to do so
will only result in making your content unusable on other systems.

What you can do is offer a help page for known problems where you can
explain how the user can fix a misconfigured system.

--
Spartanicus

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