[whatwg] <object>, "broken" content, fallback

[Jeff Walden]

http://biesi.damowmow.com/object/011.html

Firefox 2 shows FAIL.
Firefox 3 currently shows PASS.
WebKit nightly shows a broken image icon.
Opera 9.25 shows PASS.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-embedded0.html#the-object

For the moment ignoring that WebKit's using @type instead of the server-sent type of the <object> producing the PASS/FAIL/icon (contrary to current HTML5 and HTTP RFC 2616), it seems that WebKit isn't displaying fallback content when the primary content contains "errors" -- malformed images, in this case -- where recent Firefox and Opera are.

The spec doesn't currently address falling back for malformed content, i.e. malformed images, invalid XML (maybe?), content a plugin handler declines to handle (?, dunno whether this is expressible in NPAPI or ActiveX or whether that question's too implementation-dependent), etc.  I tend to think it should since a broken-image icon's not particularly useful, but I don't care strongly one way or the other.

Jeff