Re: Header, Footer, and Sidebars

On Nov 29, 11:44am, Steve Knoblock wrote:

> I understand the concern, and it did cross my mind the first time noticed
> style not inheriting into the included document. Still, I think the current
> behavior violates the basic perception of document inclusion. If OBJECT
> means some other thing (applet, what not) embedded in the page (like an
> movie embeded in a Word document)

It does. Indeed, it is designed (by the originators of embed, applet,
marquee and bgsound) to replace embed, applet, marquee and bgsound. And
img, in the fullness of time.

> and then the spec is correct.

Right.

> But when it
> comes to using this mechanism to include another document within a
> document, I expect it to function as part of the main document.

That would be server side includes, document.write and suchlike; with the
constraint that the resulting complete document is syntactically valid.

Object places a complete object of some medium inline into a document;
whether that medium is a movie, an image, a sound ... or another
document, in HTML or not. The emphasis here being on "complete" and
"self-contained".

The included document can of course reference the same stylesheet as the
containing document, at zero penalty in download time, if required.


> This is how a word processor include works.

Yes, but it isn't how object is designed to work.
>
> The behavior makes no sense for building a main document from sub-documents
> if the result does not behave and appear as a whole document.


But it does make sense for combining groups of modular, self contained
documents into a compound presentation. This allows greater flexibility of
combination without worrying whether the 'resulting document' is valid.

> I can't guess the intentions of the designers of the HTML4.0 spec, but it
> seems that the idea is to reduce the load on web servers and in general,
> the number of round trips to the server that are unnecessary.

My understanding, having talked with several of the authors, is that this
was not a major design goal. Rather, replacing multiple ways to do the
same thing with a single agreed way.


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Sunday, 30 November 1997 16:07:54 UTC