[whatwg] Markup for Web Forms 2.0 that still requires discussion

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004, Will Levine wrote:
>
> On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 16:47:26 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > > Whatever happened to this idea. It seems like it was never officially
> > > shot down, but discussion about it just died out. It still seems a
> > > good idea to me.
> >
> > We decided to drop it because IE6 drops the <object> element from the DOM,
> > so using the above would mean you can't implement the combobox in IE6
> > using HTCs or JS.
>
> I'm no expert on the DOM, but I don't really understand what you mean.
> The following code:
>
> <object id="log" classid="pizza" name="mmm"></object>
> <script>
> alert(document.getElementById("log").getAttribute("name"));
> alert(document.getElementsByTagName("object")[0].getAttribute("classid"));
> </script>
>
> works exactly how I would expect it to work in IE 6.

Now change "pizza" to "urn:pizza" (or anything that doesn't resolve in
DNS) and add something inside the <object>.

See also some of the tests here:

   http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/page-loading/alternative-content/investigation/ieisms/

...for more fun.

Basically <object> is so incredibly unreliable in IE that it is unusable.


> Also, I thought someone said something about IE discarding DOM info on
> unknown elements (e.g. datalist) also.

It doesn't discard them, it keeps enough information in the DOM to
reconstruct unknown elements. (To be precise, it converts unknown start
tags to empty elements and unknown end tags to empty elements with the tag
name prefixed by a slash.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'