[whatwg] instantiating display:none plugins

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 11/2/11 11:40 AM, Michael A. Puls II wrote:
> Boris mention that it was considered a bug by Mozilla that <object> is
> affected by the display property (including display: none).

The bug in Mozilla was pretty broad: any changes to the CSS box 
structure affected the plug-in.  That's the bug we have a fix for and 
are testing now.  The initial fix made display:none not affect the 
plug-in; Robert is reporting that this was found to not be web-compatible.

> Hixie agreed
> and said that the author is expected to use JS and not create and append
> the <object> until it's expected to be instantiated.

That's nice, but that expectation is broken since no commonly used 
browser requires authors to do that... so they don't.

> Also, the display property never really affected <object> in Opera
> except for display: none.

Yes; this thread is about "display:none" and nothing else.

> I still think display: none shouldn't affect <object> instantiation and
> if there needs to be a solution, it should be an attribute and we should
> evangelize and get any problem sites fixed

I'm not sure you understand.

The patch to make display:none is not even checked into the main Mozilla 
source tree.  The only people who have been running with that patch are 
those who manually applied it to a local source tree and then compiled. 
  That's about 3 people or so.  They've been running with this patch for 
a few weeks.  As of a week ago, at least one site was identified that 
has issues as a result.

So after a week or two of use by 3 people we already have one site the 
change is not compatible with.  Statistically speaking, the chance that 
the number of such sites is small is very low.  Just for scale, it 
usually it takes testing over months by millions of users to discover 
that something is not compatible enough with existing content.  So I 
suspect that the evangelism effort here would be rather like carrying 
water in a sieve.

Add to this the fact that currently all browsers agree with each other 
and disagree with the spec, and that implementing the behavior browsers 
agree on would keep the site working, and changing the spec to match 
reality seems like the sanest approach.

-Boris