Patent ID: 7203737

Claim:
A method for use in a networked computing environment for associating a file having a given file type with at least one application program, the network computing environment including a first and second computing device, the method comprising: in response to a user selection of a file, determining whether the first computing device has available an application program needed to access a file of the file type, and if not: launching a browser program on the first computing device; utilizing the browser program, locating a link to at least one application program residing on the second computing device adapted to access the selected file of the file type by requesting an Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) file located on the second computing device, the XSL file being necessary to download the at least one application program onto the first computing device; and presenting to the first computing device a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) reference attribute pointing to the XSL file.