Re: "Metaoutlining"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2783

Posted by sub
2005-02-19 10:57:09

[Charlie: Would it be worthwhile to implement a single-pane outliner as an OLE/COM server so that its outlines could be embedded in the same way?]

To me this sounds ideal, but I’m not sure about the versatility of the concept. The way I understand it, in order for an embedded object to be edited within the host application window, two things are required:

(a) the ability of the associated application, in this case the single-pane outliner, to operate as an OLE/COM server

(b) the ability of the host application, in this case a two-pane outliner, to operate as a fully-functional OLE/COM container

Are you aware of other applications, apart for IE, that work properly as OLE/COM containers? To my surprise, not even Firefox seems to go the full way. I tried the following two lines of HTML:

test.pdf

test.doc

IE opened both files within its own window. Firefox only opened the PDF file in its own window; it launched Word as an external application for the second file.

So in this case, Word can indeed operate as an OLE/COM server but Firefox doesn’t seem able to use it. Does this mean that, for example, InfoRapid, wouldn’t be able to open an embedded file in its own window, unless it was specifically set to collaborate with the associated OLE/COM application?

I hope this is not getting too technical for this forum, but I was wondering how consistent Windows standards such as OLE/COM really are.

alx

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