[whatwg] Client-side includes proposal

[timeless]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> When you control the software used to read the data, it doesn't matter
> what the data format is.

i kinda object to this. By this argument, <video> isn't necessary
because youtube controlled the software (flash) used to read their
videos.

the argument you've provided supports vendors shipping binaries on
their readonly media and forcing users to rely on those binaries in
order to access content.

alternatively, if what you really want is for such content providers
to die, you could say so.

but i'd rather for them to be able (and encouraged) to ship non
executable content which can be safely read by an open user agent
which conforms to some limited set (it shouldn't have to implement
every single Office Document format which was marked as "Open") of
modern standards [something like HTML5]

I've used a number of CDs which contained encyclopedias, dictionaries,
medical and legal references.
If those were shipped as html content w/ clever json indexes, then i
could add my own application later to read it. If it's some binary,
then I'm forced to trust the binary and have no access to the data.

That said. I don't know that there's anything in this specific request
that should actually be needed beyond the inline iframe feature....