OK, welcome back. The tool I wrote about in Chapter 10, the ActiveX Control Pad, is also a technological dead-end. That's because this tool was designed specifically to make it easy to work with a special ActiveX Control called the HTML Layout Control. And this control has been superceded by, yup, you guessed it, Frank Stallone. No, wait. Actually, it's been superceded by Dynamic HTML.

The reasons for this are legion, but they're valid: The HTML Layout Control was basically a placeholder for the eventual adoption of industry standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic HTML, which offer pixel-level control over the layout of elements in a Web page. Back in the days of Internet Explorer 3.0 (when I wrote this book), that kind of precise layout was not possible. So Microsoft created an ActiveX control that essentially provided that capability, knowing that it would eventually be superceded by newer technology.

Well, that time has come. I briefly considered converting some of the examples in chapters 9 and 10 to Dynamic HTML, but I frankly don't have the time or financial incentive. So I must instead offer up an apology and the lame but true observation that the technology has simply improved and moved on. According to the latest Web survey, less than 3% of users are still using Internet Explorer 3.x, so there's little reason to try and make this stuff work today.