The Proxy Solution

I know - I'm starting to get on your nerves with my Eolas posts - this will be the last for today - promised. But whilst writing the former text I had the idea of testing a proxy solution that would allow me to look at pages without having to convert them at all. What can is say - the prototype seems to work. If you have the IE Beta at hand (which only works under Windows XP as I heard), just enter any URL you want to test into this box

and press TEST. As this is only a proof-of-concept I added a little nagscreen that will pop up first - that is NOT the new confirmation box. If you have a look at the generated HTML code you will see that all OBJECT blocks have been converted. What still is a problem are pages that already use javascript to generate the OBJECT tag - you will probably only get some wrecked results for those. Of course this will also not work if you use some very exotic or completely broken html.

I think this solution is so simple that it could even be converted into some kind of server plugin which parses every page before it gets sent out. It doesn't even matter if the pages are dynamic or static. And all I ask for is merely 0.01% of the sum that MS has to pay Eolas ;-)

Posted at October 10, 2003 07:36 PM | Further reading