Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 11:03 AM EST

have you tried uninstalling QT? I doubt mozilla, etc, is "making" you use it. That's more the MS style (called viral marketing - you have to use one branded product to use another branded product etc. on down the line) ... what mozilla, as an open source browser was/is exactly trying to get away from -a browser who's heart is in accessibility- as the web was originally intended since the creation of ascii text.

In my mozilla version of Netscape you can assign any helper app you want.

What I *think* will happen after uninstalling QT from your pc- when the browser can't find the QT player or a helper app to play a file type, a prompt should come up that allows you to assign one. Then just assign WMP.

Or if you don't want to uninstall QT but wish to reassign an application for a particular file type, try this ...... go to the netscape (moz and firefox probably the same) helper application prefs.

In the helper application prefs.....

Click New Type

under "Mime type- enter audio/midi"

extension .mid

click 'open it with' and add WMP in the box (you have to browse through your installed applications to choose it)

BTW- Tom- those browser stats- yes, IE is the most popular browser in use but try to find some info on recent trends. IE is losing users. Not that long ago IE users had a 95% share of the market.

also the bg sound tag- that is not the standard but just the code a *really* old version of IE implemented to use. But works in all browser sexcept the earliest ones like the IE version that bg sound tag was originally written for in the heat of the browser wars. So using bgsound= exclusively is now an accessibility issue- whether you want to share the net with all who wish to use it, as intended in the ideals of the W3C. Again, boiling down to a matter of forcing someone to use some certain software or operating system to view/listen etc vs just sharing in a manner that anyone can use.

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 11:22 AM EST

Hi CW,

RE: "try to find some info on recent trends"

Here are some pretty reliable stats from 2005 for a group of URLs under my administration:


Browsers % of total
1. Internet Explorer 71,982 83.84
2. FireFox 8,457 9.85
3. Safari 1,981 2.31
4. Netscape 1,263 1.47
5. Mozilla 1,152 1.34
6. Opera 942 1.10
7. Konqueror 43 0.05
8. Unknown 33 0.04
9. Teleport Pro 2 0.00
10. IBrowse 1 0.00
Total: > 85,856 100.00%

So, we can see that IE is till 'holding it's own', with 84&

-also-

RE: "So using bgsound= exclusively is now an accessibility issue- whether you want to share the net with all who wish to use it, as intended in the ideals of the W3C"

Comment: I agree wholeheartedly. I will be doing a linkcheck soon on all my URLs, so maybe I will remove the darn BG sound from the pages altogether.

Even though I have BG sound on most pages, I actually prefer the 'sounds of silence' myself. There is another issue to consider, namely the fact that
many surfers use their computers at work to access websites...and the BG sound is 'not what they are looking for'...since it will only bring attention to the fact that they are 'goofing off'. :)

note to tom- I think we got caught in a wrinkle in time. I'm having blog moderating troubles today... couldn't get an entry to post, reposted it, no go, added my comment to the longer thread instead.... so went back and deleted the entries that showed up in the moderation panel but not on the blog even after clearing cache etc... lol. This is probably a problem that dates back to the time when there was no tripod help site- only AFs and the fact that i use 2 different user names between the 2 blogs and think lycos made accomodations for me so I could continue doing that as I did on the old help boards. Anyway... I finally got an entry to to show up but seems they might have shown for you long before they did for me. I have no idea which of those posts you addded the above comment to so will just repost it under you name here.

bad hair day for me lol
all the best and sorry for the confusion!
cw

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 11:34 AM EST

Hi CW,

Sorry to note that you are having a bad hair day.
Here is a cartoon to show that you are not alone,
most of my days being as you described:

http://www.hagencartoons.com/cartoon32.gif

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 11:47 AM EST

Tom- that cartoon is more prophetic than you think! My day is revolvoing around trying to capture a feral cat we've been guest hosting for the last 3-4 years and have never been able to tame. Our little, now injured, kitty friend needs to be seen by the vet ASAP.. appt already made for this AM.... but think it's going to take the help of a lion tamer to get him there.

wish us luck

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 12:43 PM EST

I certainly do wish you luck!

The feral cat problem is certainly widespread,
as mentioned on the California Feral Cat Coalition
Website @ URL: http://www.feralcat.com/

-also- I found a nice page, which lists info
on many aspects of rescue, care & rehabilitation
of feral cats @ URL:
http://amby.com/cat_site/feral.html

-and- Here is another bad hair day cartoon for you:

http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/mba/lowres/mban809l.jpg

If only the surfers could see the 'image behind the page', they would take to their heels......lol

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 1:08 PM EST

RE: "Not that long ago IE users had a 95% share of the market"

Comment: From what I can gather, the 95% applied
before the introdution of the monumentally successful
Firefox Browser, which has captured a whopping 10%
of the market.

However, methinks that, after the initial excitement, there has been a noticeable 'levelling off' ....that's what I've heard on the grapevine....

Here is an interesting quote from a Feb 3rd article:
"When IE 7 enters production release, the debate about whether Firefox offers a superior core feature set, Web standards support, usability, or even security will be over."

From:http://www.linuxpipeline.com/blog/archives/2006/02/ie_7_and_firefo.html

There is download of a Beta 2 Preview of IE 7.0 @ URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.mspx

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 1:44 PM EST

FWIW- I personally don't care what/who wins the market as long as all browers support the W3C standards. There are so many things that can be accomplished abiding by them. Those standards currently offer lots of functionality through CSS and HTML, XML etc. There's not much you can't do with it. Re one of these "standards" - CSS. CSS is a very efficient way of writing web pages that is already widely used. It's flexible, adaptable, and facilitates data transfer to boot so CSS will be sticking around. I know one of the major rewrites in IE7 will be better CSS support which in it's current browsers is notably poor. If can they do that and people still love it, then there's no reason not to use it. I have no snobbery there. Use what works best for you as long as we can all read off the same page.

You do know that Firefox is based on mozilla, right? So you can just add those stats right in with mozilla's and Netscape's stats when comparing a single browser type against IE's stats. That makes the comparison about 12-13% for moz and it's clones and 84% for IE. But what does this really mean? Well the way I see it, 13% of web users may not be able to see what you personally have to say if you don't say it in a common language. Last stat I saw was there were more than 400,000,000 internet users. That means almost 50,000,000 people you may never be able to reach.

What the W3C recommends is simply an attempt to maintain a common language between computers so that anyone can communicate globally and creatively, in graphical ways along with text, and do that in milliseconds and at will. IMHO that is something to be supported and all I really care about :).

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 5:11 PM EST

yes a browser is a browser and it's what the person is confortable with...mine just happens to be IE that I like.except for some security issues but the windows security updates take care of most of those issues now.

I am kind of looking forward to trying the new version of IE7, but then again other then it being more secure, I don't want it to be to much like mozilla...LOL.. don't get me wrong, mozilla types are ok but I like the feel of IE6 and it does run better for me then firefox or netscape on Windows OS....so hopefully the IE7 will give me what I want and am comfortalbe with.....

doodle I have uninstalled and installed QT so many times that I gave up trying...without QT, netscape will not play an embedded midi or wav file..... however like I said before, in the long thread where this all started.......lol Netscape does give me the option to use WMP as the default download player....but it needs the MIME file association set to midi in order to play embedded and hidden "midi" music, thus changing IE's default at the same time...
Have you ever noticed when you first install QT that a box comes up saying to "let you know if other programs are trying to use QT's files.....it wants control there is no doubt about it....LOL

now I could save me trouble and use QT all the time because IE does recognize QT as the plug-in....so no need to switch....another plus for IE...LOL
but then again I don't like QT...so I think IE should get smart and allow me to have a given choice aside from the mozilla plug-in of vesa versa, mozilla should allow it's player only for mozilla and etc etc.....

I was going to start using the object script for embedded midi files I use it for a few tunes already, but it is so much longer code, well anyway I don't play background music on my main pages anymore...I think a midi tune should be for fun pages and music to our ears, should be a selectable choice....

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 5:39 PM EST

cw, I just realized I called you doodle above...sorry......
she is somewhere else having a bad hair day also....

a thought just crossed my mind. I do agree that MAC's are smater then PC's for Windows. never owned a MAC and probably won't now, uless it's a gift or free ..LOL..
but could it be that MAC does not assign their file associaltions the same way as Windows does? I know it's a system that has to be use but it may be doing it differently...
maybe if what your experiencing with the browser players and working that it may be because MAC is allowing this?

Windows, before Microsoft got shot down for using only MS applicaitons, seemed to work so much better. Now it's a hassel, like I also mentioned before, most new applicaiton installs, especially photo editing software wants to change the default way the jpeg is going to edit and view on your computer and associate with...nothing worse to install a product...like QT did do me once it changed my default jpeg viewer to QT player and and icons to show Qt instead...boy that grinds me to have that happen.....because there is a series of steps to take to get the default ones back again.....LOL some installs have the decency to ask(QT did but i overlooked it, because it's something new in the QT7)but some apps. just take over without asking.....oh well I got that off my chess too, like I said at tripod club, me having a bad hair day too....must be the darn wet snow we're getting now

Saturday, 4 February 2006 - 10:33 PM EST

RE: "I personally don't care what/who wins the market as long as all browers support the W3C standards"

Comment: Well Said!

RE: "You do know that Firefox is based on mozilla, right? So you can just add those stats right in with mozilla's and Netscape's stats when comparing a single browser type against IE's stats."

Comment: Of course, most of us have a strong sentimental attachment to the old Netscape Browsers, upon which we were weened.

Then again, we have alo come to recognise the immense impact of MSN technologies and Marketing Techniques.

Wednesday, 8 February 2006 - 11:19 AM EST

Neither OS is smarter than the other. They are just different from each other... and here we should probably include Linux, too. It should not be an OS issue where the web is concerned. Remember that's why we're going for web standards in the first place. As for the real reason I use Mac- it's because it's so simple for me to use. I never have to worry about fixing this or that or even understanding how the darn thing works. That frees me up to go on to other things... such as just using it :) I can play with it like a 4 yr old would and not have to be a geek to get a sound file to play or create animations or even movies. I simply like Mac because I am stupid. Mac is very user friendly even for 4 year olds like me :). Just a personal pref, that's all.