RE: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering

On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Braden N. McDaniel wrote:

> > But if the purpose of OBJECT is to nest something independent of the
> > enclosing document within its own subwindow,
> 
> I have a bit of a problem with your wording here, based on conclusions drawn
> earlier in this thread.
> 
> We established that an embedded *HTML* document should be independent of the
> host document, in its own subwindow, and thus the "base background" of the
> inclusion should be the UA-specific default backgound. I'm not convinced
> it's appropriate to state things in these terms for *all* media types.

I think that it is (where such concepts make sense for the media type).
Using CSS (or another stylesheet language) you can alter the behaviour to
fit your needs in any case.

> If
> what you say above is accurate for all media types, consider the following:
> 
> 	<OBJECT DATA="myimage.png" TYPE="image/png">Look, Ma! No PNG!</OBJECT>
> 
> If myimage.png has transparent portions, they would show through the
> UA-default backgound color--and this, I submit, is *not* the desired
> behavior.

So what do you want? *Some* colour must shine through, because otherwise
you're not getting transparency at all.

OBJECT { background-color: white; }

So now transparent sections of the PNG would be white.

OBJECT { background-color: transparent; }

So now the background-color of the parent of the OBJECT would shine
through. (At least in the way I've always interpretted it to work - which
seems fairly intuitive to me.)

> If this were the specfied behavior, it would make transparency
> virtually useless with inclusions via OBJECT, severly limiting the utility
> of the element.

I don't see why; you can set whatever base properties for the OBJECT you
want, either by using OBJECT as a selector, or by defining your own class,
or by adding the style information directly to the relevant OBJECT tag.
I'd argue that you're severely limiting the utility of OBJECT only if you
don't *allow* the behaviour you want, and also allow the behaviour you
don't want.

(The default will be the behaviour you don't want, because the default
value for background-color in CSS is transparent.)

James

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  James Aylett, dj@insigma.com                    Insigma Technologies Ltd
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Received on Tuesday, 4 August 1998 09:14:46 UTC