- From: Joe English <joe@trystero.art.com>
- Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 11:34:31 PDT
- To: www-html@w3.org
Gerald Oskoboiny <Gerald.Oskoboiny@ualberta.ca> wrote:
> The APPLET declaration in this DTD requires some kind of content between
> the opening and closing APPLET tags, or, if there's no content, you have
> to explicitly include the dummy TEXTFLOW element, like this:
>
> <applet code=foo.class width=100 height=100>
> <textflow> </textflow>
> </applet>
> [...]
> I think applets with no content may be quite common -- if the applet is
> just eye candy, it seems appropriate to leave the applet's content empty
> (as using ALT="" is appropriate for eye-candy images.) I'm not looking
> forward to trying to explain to people why TEXTFLOW is necessary...
The current scheme strikes me as highly unintuitive too.
The rules seem to be:
* Browsers that can handle an APPLET element
are supposed to ignore the content of the APPLET element;
* The only time authors need to include start- and
end-tags for the TEXTFLOW element is when they
don't want to include a TEXTFLOW element.
> Are there any other SGML hacks that can be used to make <TEXTFLOW>
> unnecessary for empty APPLETs?
[ I don't think a "hack" is what is needed here. ]
> If it's not possible to get around this some other way, is there a better
> name than TEXTFLOW for this dummy element? (like "NOAPPLET" or something?)
Yes, an optional "NOAPPLET" or "ALTERNATE" element (with required
start- and end-tags) would have made more sense. That wouldn't
be compatible with current practice, though...
--Joe English
joe@art.com
Received on Friday, 31 May 1996 14:34:35 UTC