[whatwg] OBJECT as a link target?

Dear list,
often a page needs to interact with a plugin and tell it to load
another file. Today this is of course done with JavaScript, which is
difficult because most plugins have different JS interfaces, and there
are also differences between the plugins' ActiveX based interfaces in
IE and the NPAPI plugin ones.

Hence I thought it would be a great simplification if we could do the following:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" id="myMedia"
data="init.swf" ></object>

<a href="animation1.swf" target="myMedia"> load movie 1 </a>

A compliant UA would detect that the target was a plugin and not a
window, and call the plugin's NPP_NewStream method (I think, I don't
know NPAPI well at all) to notify it of the new file to load. I think
backwards compatibility is pretty good since a non-compliant UA would
open a new window for the new file.

What do you think of this idea?
-- 
Hallvord R. M. Steen

Received on Monday, 13 June 2005 14:19:47 UTC