Netscape 7.2 and the U.S. Patent Office web site?

Pardon the cross-postings here, but I'm an unsophisticated Netscape user
trying to get info on how the Netscape/Mozilla 7.2 browser for Mac OS X
interacts with the US Patent and Trademark Office site -- particularly
as regards patent images and the ".jfx" image format?

The specific query is appended below.

Thanks . . .

---------------------
When I go to the USPTO (US Patent Office) "Search by number" page, which
is

<http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm> ;

using my Mac iBook G4, OS 10.3.9, Netscape 7.2, QuickTime 7.1; type in
a patent number (try "3553421" if you like); bring up that patent and
click on "Images"; and then try to view one of the image pages, I get
a sub-window which flashes a QuickTime icon -- but no patent image ever
appears in it.

But if I then do a Netscape "Save As Complete Web Page" menu command, I
immediately get a downloaded index file and a downloaded folder full of
images on my HD. Most of these images are gifs, but one of them, always
labelled as "a.jfx", is the actual image of the patent page in some kind
of an unfamiliar TIFF-like format.

One or two of my graphics tools will open this .jfx image; most of them
won't; and none of them have any reference to a ".jfx" image format --
and I haven't found any reference to "jfx" in the Netscape Guidebook
(which I purchased), or any other Netscape documentation either.

There's also nothing in the PTO Help file about a ".jfx" format; and if
I do a Netscape "View Source File" menu command on the PTO image page
from which the download originated, there is no "jfx" string anywhere in
the HTML. So:

1) Where the hell does that ".jfx" suffix come from? (and why?) (and
what is "jfx"?)

2) What might be keeping the patent image itself from showing up in the
Netscape/QuickTime window on my system? (which is pretty much vanilla OS
10.3.9 and Netscape 7.2)

Thanks.
---------------------

AES <siegman RemoveThis @stanford.edu> wrote:

> Pardon the cross-postings here, but I'm an unsophisticated Netscape user
> trying to get info on how the Netscape/Mozilla 7.2 browser for Mac OS X
> interacts with the US Patent and Trademark Office site -- particularly
> as regards patent images and the ".jfx" image format?

I can't explain why those images won't display in Netscape 7.2, but for
what it's worth I'm encountering the same problem here and also with
FireFox 2.0 and Camino 1.0.3. However, I have no problem at all
displaying them in Safari (2.0.4, which is newer than there version you
have in Mac OS X 10.3.9), iCab 3.0.3, Opera 9.0.2, and even Internet
Explorer 5.2.3.

You can just use one of these other browsers instead.

> 1) Where the hell does that ".jfx" suffix come from? (and why?) (and
> what is "jfx"?)

Do a Google Groups search, as this exact topic has just been discussed
within the past week. The bottom line, as I recall, though, is that
it's a variation of the .tif format, and you can replaced the .jfx
suffix with .tif and proceed from there.

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