[whatwg] OBJECT as a link target?

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Hallvord R M Steen wrote:
>
> often a page needs to interact with a plugin and tell it to load another 
> file. Today this is of course done with JavaScript, which is difficult 
> because most plugins have different JS interfaces, and there are also 
> differences between the plugins' ActiveX based interfaces in IE and the 
> NPAPI plugin ones.
> 
> Hence I thought it would be a great simplification if we could do the 
> following:
> 
> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" id="myMedia" 
> data="init.swf" ></object>
> 
> <a href="animation1.swf" target="myMedia"> load movie 1 </a>
> 
> A compliant UA would detect that the target was a plugin and not a 
> window, and call the plugin's NPP_NewStream method (I think, I don't 
> know NPAPI well at all) to notify it of the new file to load. I think 
> backwards compatibility is pretty good since a non-compliant UA would 
> open a new window for the new file.

I think this is an interesting idea, though I don't know how much demand 
there is for this. I would recommend following this up with the group 
documenting the NPAPI. The HTML language basically already supports what 
you're asking for; although most UAs would implement it by launching a new 
instance of the plugin, it isn't be a requirement IMHO.

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