WebTV (Classic And Deluxe Spring 2001)

Kudos to the folks at WebTV over most of the recent upgrade. WebTV now fully supports Flash 3 (note to designers--make it any way you want, but do your final .swf as a Flash 3 export and WebTV can see it and use it just fine). Flash is an important graphic type. The new upgrade also allows .png files as graphics (note--transparency doesn't work in WebTV, they show as solid color areas, but they do the same in many other browser versions, so this is most likely just temporary). JavaScripting has been enhanced, though you still get to create what WebTV calls "blackholes" on many mouseovers, they run, just not the way you think they're going to. A more browserlike emplementation of how WebTV sees tables and imagemaps has been introduced in this upgrade. The only true downside is that WebTV has as yet to tackle the more exotic HTMLlike languages--it still chokes on .ihtml ("that page uses a kind of information WebTV can't use") and frequently does odd things with .jhtml, .rhtml, .fhtml and similar files. As these are perfectly valid HTMLlike languages of the mimetype is html-text variety, there's really no good reason for WebTV to still not support them.

As with previous upgrades to WebTV, Java support was withdrawn in the late 1998 upgrade and has never been reintroduced. No good reason has ever been offered for this, and what with the different EyeOpener and similar webboxes offering full Java support, this will hopefully change soon.

Mike

PS: You haven't really seen the 'Net 'til you've seen it on a 5' widescreen, which WebTV is perfect for. The infrared keyboard is near visionary.