| Allegro CL version 6.2 Significantly revised from 6.1 | |||||||||
Arguments: path-or-url
Displays a web page or file in an HTML browser program. If any of certain popular browsers is already running, then this function will use that browser, and otherwise will start up the user's default HTML browser program and use that.
An existing browser will be used even if it was not started up by lisp. This is faster than starting a separate browser just for Lisp, but may cover unrelated content to which the user may wish to return. To use only a browser instance that was started up by lisp, call invoke-private-html-browser instead. (See also use-private-html-browser.)
This function first looks for any running Internet Explorer, and uses that if found. Otherwise it looks for any running "newer" Netscape (version 6.x or later) or Mozilla browser, or else a running "older" Netscape (4.x or earlier), and uses that if found. If none of those popular browser programs is found to be running, then the user's default HTML browser program is started up and used.
If some other program is registered as the user's default HTML browser, then this function should still work but will start up a new instance of the browser on each call, which will likely be slow and accumulate lots of browser windows with multiple calls.
If this function believes that it successfully displayed the requested
page, then true is returned, and otherwise nil is returned.
The argument may be either a complete URL (such as "http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/") or a complete path namestring (such as "c:/windows/temp.txt").
It is possible that this function will not work with a future version of Netscape 6.x or Mozilla if the the keystrokes that invoke a URL or filename change. (These browsers do not implement the traditional HTML browser DDE interface, and so we send keystrokes to them instead.) In this situation, we will likely be able to make a patch to handle that situation.
Warning: This function will not work if it tries to use Internet Explorer and the end user has turned off the Reuse Windows for Launching Shortcuts option on the Advanced tab of Internet Explorer's Tools | Internet Options dialog. This appears to be a limitation of Internet Explorer, though we hope to work around this problem in a future release.
Copyright (c) 1998-2002, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Documentation for Allegro CL version 6.2. This page has had significant revisions compared to the 6.1 page.
Created 2002.2.26.
| Allegro CL version 6.2 Significantly revised from 6.1 | |||||||||