RE: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering

On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> > >If it's text/plain, the UA shouldn't "honor" any HTML markup in it ...
> >
> > So, HTML markup in plain text files is dishonorable. Well, if the
> > text can't be inserted inline and parsed then it's pretty useless
> > as a client-side include.
> 
> It's not that HTML markup in "text/plain" is dishonorable, it's just that it
> wouldn't be parsed as "text/html" because it's *not* "text/html".  You could
> put markup in a "text/plain" document, but it should show up as "text/plain"
> with the markup fragments displaying as plain text renditions of said
> "markup".

Absolutely. It's making a mockery of MIME typing otherwise, really.

> I don't see how it's useless as a client-side include mechanism.  The key
> here is *what* you want to include: text or markup.

The difficulty is that there's no MIME type for partial HTML fragments;
currently if we want to use OBJECT to embed some HTML we have to use
text/html, and include an entire HTML file. Possibly either an attribute
to text/html, or a new subtype of text, which is just a block-level
element of elements of HTML (and is contents, which could be block-level
or inline).

> And we still need a way in CSS to specify the various types that can appear
> in OBJECT, unless I'm missing something that's already there.  For example,
> something like:
> 
> <style type="text/css"><!--
> 	OBJECT text { color: black; background: "bg.gif" font: 9pt courier
> monospace }
> 	OBJECT png  { background: transparent }
> 	OBJECT html { color: green; background: white }
> 	OBJECT xml  { color: maroon; background: white }
> /* These last two could, of course, be overwritten
>    by the LINKed, embedded or inline styles in the
>    documents themselves
> */

I disagree with that comment. What if you have, using your syntax:

OBJECT html { color: green; background: white }

and then, in the stylesheet for an object of type text/html:

BODY { background: transparent }

? You're suggesting that the transparent background would override the
green background, and the colour of the *parent* of the OBJECT would shine
through. Surely it's more useful for the green colour of the OBJECT to
shine through? (Since the default value of background-color is
transparent, setting { background: white } or whatever for the OBJECT
where the text/html object itself doesn't set a BODY background-color will
have the intuitive effect.)

This example also applies (and probably more importantly) to image types
which can have transparencies.

(It should also, IMO, be applicable somehow to embedded Java etc. applets.
Doing this would probably be feasible without altering anything to do with
the Java spec, but would require a little more cooperation between the UA
and the JVM.)

James

-- 
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  James Aylett, dj@insigma.com                    Insigma Technologies Ltd
  Tel: +44 (0)1285 643100                         Norcote Barn     Norcote
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Received on Tuesday, 4 August 1998 09:14:40 UTC