RE: OBJECT out of hand

The <OBJECT> tag is designed to allow for many different data formats.  With
the IMG tag, if you wanted to put in some kind of data that would go to a
plugin, (not that I'm advocating plugins, I don't like them, but this is
just an example.)  You wouldn't want to use the <IMG> tag if this plugin is
given data that tells it how to make an HTML-based form that creates, say,
mailing labels. (I don't know why you would use a plugin for this, but it's
only an example)

As much as I like the idea of the <OBJECT> tag, I don't think that <IMG> and
<APPLET> should be deprecadated.  They do make it easier to understand how a
page is layed out if you just look at the source.  Besides, the <IMG> tag is
so well known that (my guess) probably 75% of web authors (including those
who use programs that keep the old tags) will continue to use <IMG>.

attached mail follows:

The OBJECT tag seems overloaded to me. If the point of HTML is to 
describe content, why eliminate two descriptive and intuitive tags and 
replace them with something generic? By descriptive tags I am referring 
to IMG and APPLET, whose meaning can be easily gathered from the name 
(EMBED, the third tag it replaces, is almost as meaningless as OBJECT). 
Looking at a webpage written using OBJECT instead of IMG and APPLET, you 
would have to look at the TYPE attribute to see if whether the OBJECT 
was an image, a java applet, a plug-in, etc.

Things like this really need to have separate tags, if only to make the 
HTML source understandable. I know that John Doe on Geocities uses 
FrontPage to design his site, but some of us still hand-code the stuff.
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