Brion,
thanks for response.
Can you go into a little more detail on what an applet viewer might be used for?
The goal is to provide "inexperienced" users functions adaequate to "old" LizardTech, now Celartem viewer add-on like zooming, page scrolling and so on for a use in connection with our mini-DigiBib (transkription of historical/genealogical handwritings and so on).
I agree, for simply viewing a page JPG conversion is often sufficient. But bad scanned sources should be at least simple zoomable.
This - without additional manual installation of some add-on by this mentioned user. JRE is installed in many cases, a transparent applet would be good.
I understand (may be wrong) that the LizardTech add-on downloads and shows only needed page(s) at once from a given remote DJVU file too - why a applet couldn´t do so?
Concerning your security headache I think it is more comprehensible for JavaScript (sandboxes) then for Java, and MediaWiki is "swimming" in JavaScript. But ultimate decision makes the user.
Uwe (Baumbach) U.Baumbach@web.de