Re: a bad idea (fwd)

On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Brian Behlendorf wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> ...
> > Honestly, I've never quite figured out
> > why turning IMG into a container wasn't used as the backward compatible
> > route out of the mess involving its introduction
> 
> Are you serious?  Think about what a browser would do on a typical
> existing WWW page with the contained text while it looked for the next
> </IMG>.... 

???. I am slow today. How is this any different than the change over of
<P> to a container a few years ago? It should be possible to craft the
content model to allow reliably implying of the close tag. As I noted - it
*is* going to have a pretty restricted content model. Probably included
free text is going to have to be omitted entirely. So the first thing a
parser runs into besides allowed tags for the <IMG> container terminates
the <IMG>. It is not going to be able to even remotely substitute for the
functionality of <OBJECT>. The problem would have been easy to solve three
and half years ago when IMG was first introduced by making it a container
immediately when people realized the problem. Now the legacy browser base
limits what can be done with the content model severely. It doesn't mean
that <IMG> can't be improved - just that you can't improve it into
a semi-substitute for <OBJECT>.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Monday, 15 July 1996 11:53:33 UTC