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Re: Serving up spreadsheets

On 30 Mar 1996 09:29:44 -0700, Byron_Davies@mesaqm.sps.mot.com wrote:

>Has anyone had any experience with distributing Excel spreadsheets or other
>Mac documents through CL-HTTP (to Mac clients, of course)?

Netscape 2.0 appears to be preconfigured (see Options menu, General
Preferences item, Helpers tab) to save Excel documents to disk if it
receives them. In general it will recognize them via the .xls extension. In
the Helpers tab you can change this so Netscape will open the documents
directly in Excel, and you can also choose a File Type that might be
recognized if the file name has no extension.

The server (CL-HTTP or otherwise) must be configured to serve MIMEType
"application/x-excel" or the Excel documents will not be sent to browsers.
Similarly for other documents, Mac and otherwise. Some Excel document
formats should also be displayed correctly by Windows browsers.

>Can Excel be used as a Netscape plug-in?

No. Plugins are not applications. They are code fragments called upon by
Netscape via its API to draw in its windows. Applications can be Helpers
but not Plugins.

There are a lot more plugins for Windows than Mac. Supposedly the Netscape
plugins page lists a couple of plugins for Windows that handle many file
types. These vendors may be working on Mac versions.

Steve
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