You might be wondering what really happens under the hood when a scriptlet is running. Or rather, what does Internet Explorer 4.0 have to do to display a scriptlet? Before reading further, consider that this is a section that attempts to dig out some internal features of the IE40 implementation of scriptlets. You could jump over it if you are not at all interested in such topics. Your understanding of the whole subject won't be affected if you do.
When the browser detects a scriptlet in the current HTML page, it embeds an instance of a specialized container that displays the content of the referenced scriptlet. As seen above, the
attribute plays a fundamental role.type
But what's this specialized container IE 4.0 embeds in the currently viewed page in order to display a scriptlet? It is just an ActiveX control that acts as the IE 4.0 HTML viewer engine. In practice, it parses the HTML source code of the scriptlet's page and builds the DHTML object model. All of the rendering is done within the assigned site, just as with ordinary controls.
This ActiveX control is called Microsoft scriptlet Component and it silently installs with the final release of Internet Explorer 4.0.
Internet Explorer 4.0 is supposed to ship for a number of different platforms. Win32 aside, of course, the implementation of the scriptlet's container won't be ActiveX-based.