RE: IE's AND EVERYONE ELSE'S object implementation problems (was RE: Baby Steps or Backwards Steps?)

Robert Burns [mailto:rob@robburns.com] wrote:
>What I've found is this:
>  * IE7 (7.0.5730.11): Fails every test. ... (sorry Chris).

I didn't ask because I wanted a particular answer, I asked because I wanted to understand the problems as you see them.

>It presents the fallback content for every image, video and
>audio file

Actually, no it's not (notice the fallback text isn't there) - and on purpose.  The #1 problem as I see it for IE's <object> support today is that IE does not pull out an intrinsic size from the object data.  We _ARE_ displaying the objects - we are displaying them with a size of 0x0.  Yeah.  I'm not defending this, just stating.

The #2 problem is that images we know how to natively handle - JPG and GIF, at least, but I think PNG too - are handled by IE's native JPG display by basically embedding an IFRAME in place of the OBJECT (this isn't really what's happening, but functionally it's an appropriate way to think of it.  This means we get a small default padding (cf navigating to a large JPEG file - there's padding), and scrollbars if you overflow.

Both of these are solvable, of course.

>This could be due to the video formats I chose, but since the images
>were not handled either I doubt it. I would imagine that anyone with
>a recent QuickTime/iTunes installed on Windows should be able to
>handle this content.

Only if QuickTime installs itself as an ActiveX control that handles that media type.  I think it does, but I'm not sure.  I would not recommend 3GP or QuickTime as a trial test, because it relies on a non-default install - I would recommend .MPG.  Old, no-interframe-compression MPG.  Even Windows Media format would be a better choice, since Mac OS X at least comes with Flip4Mac installed, but I would stick with MPG.

Thanks for digging in to this.

-Chris

Received on Tuesday, 21 August 2007 15:59:54 UTC