35886 - Rendering of Word Documents

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Brian Staples]

The rendering of Word Documents should be worked into the browser. It would
have to work like an adobe acrobat document (.pdf) does itwould automatically
render in the browser. However if someone tried to open a document from their
hard drive it goes into Word Viewer or Word if they are installed.

Comment 1

[Kathleen :Brade]

Oh, please, NO!  <gag!>
Maybe someone should write a plugin for this but it shouldn't be "built-in"!

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

I don't think this'll go far.

Comment 3

[dark]

Agreed...not a real problem. Definately a "plugin" thing the browser itself
should not be hampered with. Especially since so many usable solutions already
exist. When feature for editing plugins/applications mine-types is in place, it
would be as easy as to associate files of type "doc" with mswordview, available
for Mac and Windows. A GNU licenced library also exists; wv, which can also
translate doc to html. I use it on Linux with NC4.7 - works for me.

Comment 4

[dark]

err.. MIME-types.

Comment 5

[Sean Richardson]

Since application/msword is on the list of media types at the IANA site --
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types --
it is reasonable to expect Mozilla to recognize that media (MIME) type
if a file is sent with that type in the Content-type: header,
and allow the user to specify an application/plugin to handle it, but
IMO that's as far as Mozilla should go.

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

Why does it matter whether it's on that list?  The user should always be able 
to make a specific MIME type go to a specific application.

Comment 7

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

does mozilla recognise the .doc mime type?

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I think so :-) My lxr.mozilla.org searches are inconclusive.

Gerv

Comment 9

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Including support for Word documents has the risk of encouraging the use of Word 
documents on the Web. Not good.

Comment 10

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Sorry for the spam.  New QA Contact for Browser General.  Thanks for your help
Joseph (good luck with the new job) and welcome aboard Doron Rosenberg

Comment 11

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

confirming, adding helpwanted keyword and assigning to [e-mail] until
someone steps up to write the plugin.

Comment 12

[Jesse Ruderman]

There already are a few plug-ins for word docs (looks like they're Windows 
only, unfortunately):
http://cgi.netscape.com/cgi-bin/plug-in_finder.cgi?application/msword

If I try to download a word doc from http://www.hklib.org.hk/application.html, 
and click "More Info..." in the save dialog, I get forwarded to that plug-in 
finder page.  (That wasn't very obvious.. I only discovered it after 
constructing the cgi url myself.  And my browser window got hijacked to go to 
the plug-in page.)

Does Mozilla do the same thing for pdf files, or does it prompt the user to 
download the plug-in?

Comment 13

[Peter Lubczynski]

I think this should be marked INVALID or WONTFIX (anyone agree?) because it
doesn't make sense for Mozilla to nativly render Word native documents. I think
the reporter may be refering to the fact that Win32 Internet Explorer invokes
Word through OLE or ActiveX. A similar effect can be achieved by using a
full-page plugin as we currently do for PDF (Acrobat).

For Word, at least on my Windows 2000 with Office 2000, clicking on the URL link
above and choosing "Open" does open the document in Word just fine. 

Comment 14

[karnaze (gone)]

Marking future and reassigning to chrisn.

Comment 15

[Sam Katz]

I disagree strongly with this bug.

Webmasters are constantly trying to avoid IE's integration of known file types.
If we add a way to avoid this, we would be adding a proprietary tag.
Sam

Comment 16

[Alvaro Munoz-Aycuens]

Summary is a bit confusing, sounds like if Mozilla needs to be capable of
showing word documents instead of open an embedded viewer.Someone wants to
change it?

Comment 17

[Daniel Wang]

-> WONTFIX

Even if someone does come up with the code, I doubt we can spare any
programmer and QA resource to test it out...

Better take this to www.mozdev.org or something like that

Comment 18

[timeless]

I'm trying to limit the Core:Plug-ins component to code related to the loading/hosting of plugins. As this is a request that the browser render word documents, it falls outside that scope. Thus, I'm dumping it into Core:General.

This doesn't mean we're going to implement this, in fact, I'm going to verify that it's unlikely that we will.

fwiw, pluginfinder seems dead, the closest seems to be:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/winmime.php