[whatwg] OBJECT as a link target?

[Michael Enright]

If this is commonly done with just one line of JS then a bot could
probably find a significant number of pages with that one-liner in the
'a' element's attributes. By one line, I mean a simple unwrapped
property change or invocation of a standard method, not through a
wrapper.

It would be worth spec'ing in HTML5 if it applies to plugins that
don't obey the NPAPI.

Also it is a little troublesome because the proposal messes with the
namespace that the target attribute applies to. Currently there is no
reason to worry about a clash between the names of the windows and the
ids in the current page. To refine the proposal this potential clash
would have to be addressed. Could the target attribute in the example
be "#myMedia" to refer to the id on the current page? In general to
change the media on plugin P on window W you write 'target="W#P"'? And
target="_blank#something" has no defined resolution.

On 3/1/07, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>