[whatwg] The <object> element and fallback content

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Christian Biesinger wrote:
> 
> Consider this HTML snippet:
>   <object data="http://foo/some_404_page"></object>
> So, no fallback content is given.
> 
> Should the 404 page be rendered, or should the object behave like it was
> display:none?

Neither, it should behave as if it was display:inline (i.e. it should 
show its (empty) fallback content).


> (It seems pretty clear to me that if fallback content is given,
> that should be used for 404 pages. The question is, of course, what would
> constitute lack of fallback content, especially in the light of <param>)

There is never "lack of fallback content", the empty string is valid 
fallback content.

Or at least it will be once I write that part of the spec, assuming no-one 
disagrees. :-)


> Then, what about:
>   <object data="http://www.mozilla.org/" type="x-foo/x-bar"></object>
> 
> Clearly, that MIME type is not supported by anything. So... should the browser
> request http://www.mozilla.org, find out it's text/html, and render it, OR
> should it show nothing (or fallback content if any) because the type is not
> supported anyway?

It MAY use the type attribute to determine that it probably won't support 
the content and therefore skip the expensive fetch operation, but it MAY 
also fetch the content and examine its type, in which case it MUST honour 
the real type and ignore the "type" attribute.

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