Inside Technique : Extending the Browser : Adding User Interface

By default, all extensions run without a user interface. By adding a Flags DWORD registry setting to your extension with the value of 1, the extension will be displayed inside of a modal dialog. This allows you to request input from the user and respond. The built-in Find dialogs work in this manner and are actually written using DHTML.

In the InsideDHTML tools, we display results in a non-modal dialog. This is accomplished by using DHTML to open a new window and the write methods to write the contents into the page. For example:

var w = external.menuArguments
var newWin = open()
newWin.document.open()
newWin.document.write("URL: " + w.location)
newWin.document.close()

You can even use the write methods to write scripts into the new window. These scripts can only manipulate the contents of the new window and cannot access any other document. This is because the new window is limited by the built in cross-frame security model.

This concludes our introduction to using DHTML to extend Internet Explorer 4.0. To help you create registry files, the next page includes a tool that walks you through all the different registry options and creates the registry file for you.

© 1997-2000 InsideDHTML.com, LLC. All rights reserved.