Re: //head/object

> 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