- From: Neil Soiffer <NeilS@dessci.com>
- Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 22:08:37 -0700
- To: public-html@w3.org
- Message-ID: <x2nd98bce171005052208re0a11076sd5e949133b7731cc@mail.gmail.com>
> On May 3, 2010, at 17:55, Toby Inkster wrote: > > > I was thinking of using <object> in <head> as a way of embedding RDFa > > or microdata without disturbing the appearance of the page. > > That doesn't seem like a legitimate use case of <object> to me. Rather, it seems like a way of exploiting the limitations of DTD-based validation. If you are using <object> for a purpose other than embedding an external resource, you are misusing <object> that already does too many things. > > > Filing a bug against html5-diffs seems to beg the bigger question of > > whether <object> should be allowed inside <head>. I can't find any > > record of this having been discussed - the HTML5 draft spec seems to > > have just accepted the behaviour of Opera, Gecko and WebKit, even > > though it goes against the HTML 4 specification, and against Internet > > Explorer's behaviour. > > What HTML 4 said doesn't really matter. What Opera, Gecko, WebKit and IE do does. When there's a 3 vs. 1 situation with 3 on the side of parser simplicity, I think the spec should follow the 3. IE's binary behavior's make use of <object> inside of <head>: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa744098%28VS.85%29.aspx Breaking this compatibility with HTML4 will break all of the existing web pages that make use of this facility, including the users of our MathPlayer MathML renderer for IE. I did an experiment and put the object tag inside of <body> and MathPlayer was still triggered, but existing pages would not work in HTML5. Our usage stats say tell us that over 1.5 million pages with MathML are being viewed with MathPlayer per month, so breaking that compatibility will affect plenty of people/content. To add to the chorus of "where is the discussion on this change": has anyone collected statistics on how frequently <object> occurs inside of <head>. I doubt that MathPlayer is the only binary behavior out there... Neil Soiffer Senior Scientist Design Science, Inc. www.dessci.com ~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, WebEQ, Equation Editor ~
Received on Thursday, 6 May 2010 05:09:11 UTC