Microsoft's implementation of OBJECT hosed for JPEG?

I need some other people to verify a problem I just discovered with
the way Microsoft implemented OBJECT. One of the key uses of OBJECT is to
allow new media types to be deployed without breaking older browsers. Well
- it appears that Microsoft implemented OBJECT as a ActiveX control and
can't tell the difference between a JPEG file it knows how to display
internally and perfectly safely and an insecure ActiveX object. My
attempts to do so cause MSIE 3.01 to hang trying to load the images. The
hits are in the log - but MSIE never actually displays them. So much for
graceful deployment.

Check my homepage at <URL:http://www.netimages.com/~snowhare/> with MSIE
3.01 to see what I mean. There is supposed to be an image at the top right
of a rabbit. You can see it fine with NS since NS doesn't do OBJECTs. But
not with MSIE 3.01.

I never noticed it until now because I had disabled ActiveX for security
reasons (I just thought they were out and out lying about OBJECT working -
didn't realize you had to have ActiveX enabled to get OBJECT. The logfile
finally clued me in). I could live with OBJECT not working at all - but
this is unacceptable. It is Mosaic and tables all over again. It is
*WORSE* to have a broken implementation of OBJECT than no implementation
at all. 

Oh - why am I trying to display JPEGs using OBJECT? Because progressive
JPEGs break a large percentage of browsers still. By restricting the
progressive JPEGs to browsers that are new enough to know about OBJECT, I 
was hoping to gracefully deploy them without breaking anyone. Sigh. Now
I get to spend half an hour *removing* OBJECT from my pages.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Sunday, 1 December 1996 10:11:29 UTC