Re: a bad idea (fwd)

On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> > ...
> > > Honestly, I've never quite figured out
> > > why turning IMG into a container wasn't used as the backward compatible
> > > route out of the mess involving its introduction
> > 
> > Are you serious?  Think about what a browser would do on a typical
> > existing WWW page with the contained text while it looked for the next
> > </IMG>.... 
> 
> ???. I am slow today. How is this any different than the change over of
> <P> to a container a few years ago? It should be possible to craft the
> content model to allow reliably implying of the close tag. As I noted - it
> *is* going to have a pretty restricted content model. Probably included
> free text is going to have to be omitted entirely. So the first thing a
> parser runs into besides allowed tags for the <IMG> container terminates
> the <IMG>. It is not going to be able to even remotely substitute for the
> functionality of <OBJECT>. The problem would have been easy to solve three
> and half years ago when IMG was first introduced by making it a container
> immediately when people realized the problem. Now the legacy browser base
> limits what can be done with the content model severely. It doesn't mean
> that <IMG> can't be improved - just that you can't improve it into
> a semi-substitute for <OBJECT>.

Ah, then I'm not quite sure why you'd be suggesting IMG as a container tag
if the only thing it could contain is other tags - I see a very limited
usefulness of that, and a large potential for people to get it wrong...
what would that provide now that we have OBJECT?  And yes, I agree, it
should have been made a container long ago, though even then I would have
preferred  <A REL="embed"></A>.  All water under the bridge at this
point.

	Brian

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Received on Monday, 15 July 1996 17:54:55 UTC