[whatwg] Test suite: Embedded content

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Mon Nov 28 14:41:18 PST 2005


On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Simon Pieters wrote:
> 
> What about <img> only supporting raster images? If authors want vector 
> images then they could use <object> instead.

Maybe, yeah, but I don't like having something that is <object>-only; the 
idea is that <embed>, <img>, and <iframe> are case-specific versions of 
<object>, so that you use <embed>, <img>, or <iframe> when you know what 
you want, and <object> when you don't. (<object> is less efficient to 
implement because the UA has to wait til it knows what the content type is 
before it can know how to render the element.)


> > For <embed> you want to show only things that require plugins, and 
> > only if they have 200 (or 301-200) responses.
> 
> Interestingly enough though, Firefox 1.6a1 displays the PNG images from 
> <embed> natively (not via a plugin). Further more, a "plugin" is 
> probably UA dependent; some UAs require a plugin for a particular format 
> while another UA supports it natively (e.g. IE has a plugin for MathML 
> while Mozilla supports it natively).

Yeah, what's a plugin and what isn't is a UA thing, so if the UA decides 
that its PNG and SVG "plugins" happen to be native support, well, that's 
what it is. (Both PNG and SVG are recognised by Mozilla's <embed> because 
at one point they were plugin-only in IE and so people would use <embed> 
instead of <img>/<object> and so when Mozilla moved to native implemen- 
tations for those types, it kept <embed> working for compatiblility.)


> How should <noembed> work? (If at all, I actually dislike all <no*> 
> element types.)

No idea, haven't looked at <noembed> yet. Found any trends in support?

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



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