Taking icons from visitors, am i mad?

Hello there. I have a crazy idea that I kind of like. The thing is that I want to display visitor’s own icons in the folder view of the site.

Let’s see if I can explain it:

Let’s have user "A" log on to our website. He is looking right now on the detailed list of the files and folders available to him. "A" is running windows XP, and has WinZip for .zips, acdsee for .jpgs and acrobat for .pdfs. Now when he's on our site he actually sees WinZip’s icons with zips, acdsee's with jpgs...

We have another user "B" half a world away visiting the same site at the same time. He's running Mac and has Stifit for zips, Photoshop for jpgs and he does not have a thing for pdfs. He's looking at the same page as "A", but he sees Stiffit's icons for zips, Photoshop’s for jgps, and pdfs are displayed as a regular general files.

Now I KNOW that PHP does not have a functionality to do this, but I am hoping that something could be done with client side scripting, java is just one example.

Any ideas are welcomed, and nothing is too small to be said.

Thank you

it can't be done...

php does infact have the power to do this but it would most likely need to be uploaded to the users machine. Virtually any solution you can comeup with is going to require either installing something on the client machine (this is frequently called spyware) or at least it is going to make all sorts of warnings appear on the users screen.

On the other hand you could quite possibly guess at some of these by detecting the OS of the visitor.

Bottom line is people won't enjoy this and spyware blockers will certainly assume you are doing something wrong even if your intent is harmless this is invading someones privacy which is generally a bad idea that will cost you visitors.