[whatwg] How not to fix HTML

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 03:01:47 +0600, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

>> Embed doesn't provide a fallback mechanism, and mixing parameters to the
>> plugin, and attributes can be error prone, depending on the plugin,
>> while object makes use of param.

> Sure but, everyone uses <embed>, and <object> doesn't (in practice) work
> that well really. Also, <object> is overloaded to do things like IFrames,
> and images, and plugins... having <embed> just for plugins would make it
> like <img> and <iframe>, the simple <object> for plugins.

I belive that there should not be any special markup for plugins. The fact that the browser uses a plugin to display the movie, or image, or VR scene, or whatnot, is that browser's implementation detail. Some text-only browsers use external programs to display images, but there isn't a special markup which tells them to do so. I don't see why video clips should be any different.

Because one of the goals of WHAT, as I perceive it, is to provide semantic markup for things that are currently marked up presentationally, I think that HTML 5 should encourage transition from the presentational EMBED ("plugin content") to the semantic OBJECT ("external subdocument") or even to more semantically fine-grained VIDEO, AUDIO etc. It doesn't mean that support for EMBED should be dropped: just like with FONT, there are many existing documents which use it, and there probably will be authors which continue using it despite its use being discouraged.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com