- From: Philip Taylor <philip@zaynar.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:14:58 +0100
- To: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- CC: public-html <public-html@w3.org>
Robert Burns wrote: > Thanks for the additional statistics. However, I just don't know what > these are supposed to show. No site is going to break because their > |blink| element didn't work. They will still break, though to a much more limited extent, since IE users won't get the optimal viewing experience that the author intended and may miss out on the intended emphasis of some parts of the page - the numbers aren't directly comparable with the numbers for features that break to a less limited extent, but they still give some indication that many people are happy to use features that are not interoperable and are not supported by the majority browser. > However, creating a client-side image map > that submits form data, is not something that can sorta work in some > browsers and not in others. I may be misunderstanding you, but it's never possible to create client-side image maps that submit form data in any browser - form submission only happens as part of server-side image maps. When they are mixed, like in <http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3C%21DOCTYPE%20html%3E%0D%0A%3Cbody%3E%0D%0A%3Cmap%20name%3Dm%3E%3Carea%20shape%3Drect%20coords%3D0%2C0%2C100%2C100%20href%3Dhttp%3A//google.com%3E%3C/map%3E%0D%0A%3Cform%20action%3D.%3E%3Cinput%20type%3Dimage%20src%3Dimage%20usemap%3D%23m%3E%3C/form%3E> in Firefox and Opera, the left half of the image (under an <area>) is just a plain client-side image-map link, and the right half (not under any <area>) is a server-side image-map form-submission button. In IE, the client-side image-map will be ignored and the whole of the image will act as the server-side image-map form-submission button. So you can still use <input usemap> without breaking in IE, if you make your server-side code redirect the user as appropriate. But even though you can easily make it work, the collected data suggests that almost nobody does that. > My question would be if <input type='image' usemap=''> is > easily dropped in favor of <img usemap=''>, then why isn't <input > type='image'> also easily dropped in favor of <img>? It would have to be in favour of something like <button style="border: none; background: transparent"><img ...></button> to get the form-submission effect. It wouldn't be able to do the form-submission-with-x-and-y-coordinates effect at all. I have no idea how much people rely on the latter effect - it would be useful to find out how it's used. > Why aren't we discussing dropping @ismap from |input|? That attribute has been dropped already - <input type=image> always submits the x and y values, regardless of whether you specify ismap. (That matches what IE/FF/Opera (and probably Safari) do.) > what's so important about > purging the language. Let's focus on the interoperability, on more > consistent parsing and rendering and on the new semantics. > What's the point of spending all this time trying to purge these pieces. Interoperability and consistency can be achieved less expensively by removing a feature than by specifying it, implementing it, testing it, describing it in tutorials and books, etc. <input usemap> would have a similar cost to an entirely new feature, since there is no adequate specification of its current behaviour (HTML4 says almost nothing, and isn't even consistent about whether it's specified or not [1]) and it is not yet widely implemented or documented. The cost has to be balanced against the benefits, and it looks like people have not seen a convincing demonstration that the benefits are sufficient. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.6.2 - "Future projects: ... Another possible extension would be to add the usemap attribute to INPUT for use as client-side image map when "type=image"" -- Philip Taylor philip@zaynar.demon.co.uk
Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2007 15:15:34 UTC