29 Jun, 2009Embedding Java Applets
Embedding Java applets in a web page should be pretty trivial, there is even an 'applet' HTML tag specifically for that purpose. However, it turns out this is now deprecated in favour of the new 'object' tag. As usual, this new tag is implemented differently by different browsers so it ends up being anything but trivial.
28 Jun, 2009Browser Detection Methods
Whilst there may be many reasons for wanting to know which browser your web page is being viewed within, the main one I find is needing to tweak some CSS or embedded applet code to accommodate certain rendering inconsistencies. At first glance, this seems pretty easy with dynamically-generated pages as most server-side programming or scripting languages provide a way of doing this as the page is being assembled for delivery. However, for both static web pages and content that is likely to be cached by a content management system (CMS) it isn't so easy. This article therefore considers a range of available browser detection methods.