Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

ActiveX Controls

ActiveX controls are miniature applications that work like plug-ins in Web browsers. In fact, the Flash Player for the Windows version of Internet Explorer is an ActiveX control.

However, this powerful technology can handle much more than multimedia; it can plug right into your computer, accessing files and other programs, or enabling spreadsheets and other productivity programs, right in a Web page.

Unfortunately, this Microsoft technology only works on Windows machines and only in Internet Explorer. As a result, it has yet to gain a foothold on the Web—and it may never. But if you’re required to incorporate an ActiveX control into your site (perhaps because Microsoft is your client), then here’s how to do it.

To insert ActiveX controls that you’ve programmed in Visual Basic or found on the Web, just choose Insert→Media→ActiveX. An ActiveX icon appears on the Web page, selected so that you can now change its options using the Property inspector.

ActiveX Properties

Some of the settings you can change for ActiveX controls (see Figure 13-7) are the same as you’d find for the other technologies described in this chapter (page 406): name, width/height, alignment, and margins, for example. A few others are unique to this technology:

Figure 13-7. ActiveX controls can vary widely in what functions they perform, so there is no standard set of properties for all controls.

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