[whatwg] Usemap and ismap for canvas tag

Krzysztof Żelechowski giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl
Wed Mar 5 09:56:10 PST 2008


Dnia 05-03-2008, Śr o godzinie 09:39 -0600, Greg Houston pisze:

> On a side note, I was just glancing over the newly released, Internet
> Explorer8 Readiness Toolkit, and it says: "Internet Explorer 8 offers
> Web developers the opportunity to write standards-compliant HTML-based
> Web pages that support features (such as SVG, XUL, and MathML) in
> namespaces, provided that the client has installed appropriate
> handlers for those namespaces via binary behaviors. (A binary behavior
> is a type of ActiveX control.)"
> 
> I am not entirely sure what that means, but it looks like users will
> still have to install something in order to view SVG with Internet
> Explorer. There is no mention of canvas.

FYI: It means you use a custom tag instead of OBJECT; 
the control to embed is determined by the tag name 
and the binary behaviour provides the associations.  
It is more convenient 
when you intend to use several embedded elements
or have the element data in-line.

The main objection is that such a document is nonconforming.  
There are two ways to embed foreign content in HTML: 
the SCRIPT element and a data URI.  
SCRIPT has its limitations (no decrement operator in JavaScript) 
and data URIs are cumbersome and unsupported by IE.

XHTML is somewhat more flexible 
but IE offers to save it to disk or displays it as a tree 
unless you cheat about the content type 
in which case you break everybody else.
(You have to explicitly forbid ASP to cheat if you do not want it to 
because ASP think and instruct the developer 
that XHTML is just like HTML, only better.) 

Looks like a dead end to me.

Keep smiling
Chris




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