Hello all.<br><br>There a number of attributes that are designed to give the user agent a preview of what MIME type to except for referenced resource. (And there are also attributes like @hreflang that preview other things.) And yet, <iframe>, which has to load a full document, has no ability to allow the user agent to determine compatibility.<br>
<br>Thus, I propose doing one of the following:<br>(1) add @srctype to <iframe><br>(2) extend the meaning of @type that applies to <a>, <area>, and <link> to apply to <iframe>, as well<br><br>
I'm more inclined to believe that option (2) is the better option.<br><br>But now for the reasoning.<br><br>It should not be assumed that whatever resource included via <iframe> is going to be of type 'text/html' or another easily parsable type. Thus, it could be helpful for the author to give the user agent a hint as to what type of document it is requesting be displayed inline, and allow the user agent to choose not to display the contents of the <iframe> if it feels it cannot support it.<br>
<br>The particular use case that prompted me to think about this is including a PDF via <iframe>. In Firefox (last I checked), one is required to install a separate add-on in order to support in-browser display of PDF files on Mac OS X, since there is no native or integrated Adobe Reader support available. Without the add-on, the user will be prompted to download the PDF file, which can be very disconcerting if the user wasn't even expecting a PDF file. And I'm sure there are plenty of other instances where this same situation occurs. (TIFF files, perhaps? Like on the U.S. Patent Office's website?)<br>
<br>Now, I'm not a spec implementor by any means, but I am a web author and a web user, so I've been on both sides of this issue. And it doesn't appear that it would be too complicated to extend the existing support of @type.<br>
<br>Thoughts?<br><br>Gordon<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Gordon P. Hemsley<br><a href="mailto:me@gphemsley.org">me@gphemsley.org</a><br><a href="http://gphemsley.org/">http://gphemsley.org/</a> • <a href="http://gphemsley.org/blog/">http://gphemsley.org/blog/</a><br>
<a href="http://sasha.sourceforge.net/">http://sasha.sourceforge.net/</a> • <a href="http://www.yoursasha.com/">http://www.yoursasha.com/</a><br>