[whatwg] <video> element feedback

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Wed Mar 28 16:35:23 PDT 2007


Laurens Holst wrote:
> As said, I tried a few things with embedding an image, video and SVG 
> with the <object> tag:
...
> First of all, one annoying thing is that you have to provide sizes, 
> otherwise the object will not be visible.

At least in Mozilla, this is false for images.  It should become false for SVG 
by Gecko 1.9, hopefully.  The issue of sizing of <object> that's rendered via a 
plug-in remains in Gecko, due to limitations in the plug-in API.  But that's not 
a fundamental issue with <object> itself.

> In all browsers the object is an inline replaced element.

Unless styled to be a block, in which case it's a block-level replaced element.  ;)

> Also, in reality everybody adds a two big 
> attributes for Internet Explorer’s plugin finder, and an <embed> tag 
> inside the object for Mozilla’s plugin finder (which still only works 
> with <embed> and not <object>).

Sorry, that's false.  Plug-ins work fine with <object> in Mozilla, _unless_ you 
use a "classid" attribute with a value that is an ActiveX component ID.  If you 
do that, Mozilla will fall back, since it doesn't support ActiveX plug-ins.

Now the problem is that the _only_ way IE supports plug-ins via <object> is if 
they're ActiveX and the right component ID is specified.  It doesn't support 
dispatch based on MIME type.  So you get the nesting you mentioned.  Oh, and IE 
does something broken if you nest <object> inside <object>; otherwise authors 
could use <object> inside <object> instead of <embed> inside <object> as they do 
now.

> However, if the image specifies dimensions, in 
> Firefox they override the object dimensions and you get scroll bars on 
> the object

This is a bug, hopefully to be fixed for Gecko 1.9.

-Boris




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