I've been charged with figuring out how to do plug-in detection for a shareware animation plug-in, and though I have it working in Javascript on Netscape, I'm having a heck of a time with the VBScript version for IE. For that reason, and the fact that I don't want to make any assumptions about the user having client-side scripting turned on, I was hoping to be able to accomplish the same thing on the server side.

First I tried checking HTTP_ACCEPT to see what media types the client was accepting, but only came up with "image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*". I guess the plug-in's MIME type is somewhere under */*...

Then I tried using the CGI.pm module, 'cuz it says (and I quote)

Accept()

Return a list of MIME types that the remote browser accepts. If you give this method a single argument corresponding to a MIME type, as in $query->Accept('text/html'), it will return a floating point value corresponding to the browser's preference for this type from 0.0 (don't want) to 1.0. Glob types (e.g. text/*) in the browser's accept list are handled correctly.
Note the capitalization of the initial letter. This avoids conflict with the Perl built-in accept().

So this is the code I used:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
$q = new CGI;
print $q->header(),
$q->start_html(-title=>'Plug-in Detection'),
$q->Accept('x-animation/x-inkmorph');
$q->end_html();
[download]

I loaded the CGI on a browser that had the plug-in and got a result of 1. Sounds great, right? It was, until I tried it on a browser that didn't have the plug-in, and I still got a result of 1.

What am I doing wrong here? Or is server-side plug-in detection simply not possible? If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Failing that, I could use some good VBScript links. :(

Thanks,
Michelle