Re: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering

James Aylett wrote:

>> We established that an embedded *HTML* document should be independent of
the
>> host document, in its own subwindow, and thus the "base background" of
the
>> inclusion should be the UA-specific default backgound. I'm not convinced
>> it's appropriate to state things in these terms for *all* media types.
>
>I think that it is (where such concepts make sense for the media type).
>Using CSS (or another stylesheet language) you can alter the behaviour to
>fit your needs in any case.

The point made earlier was that if text/html OBJECTs are truly rendered
entirely independent of the document in which they are embedded, then the
subwindow in which they appear cannot be affected by the embedding document.
So the background that would otherwise appear in OBJECT is not a factor in
the rendering of the embedded document.

Repeating from 13.5 of the HTML 4.0 REC: "An embedded document is entirely
independent of the document in which it is embedded...An embedded document
is only rendered within another document (e.g., in a subwindow); it remains
otherwise independent."

Is a text/plain file a document? If so, it is rendered in a subwindow,
entirely independent of the embedding document, and that subwindow will have
its own default background. But non-documents must be treated differently,
e.g.: for an image the background can be determined by the embedding
document.

>I don't see why; you can set whatever base properties for the OBJECT you
>want, either by using OBJECT as a selector, or by defining your own class,
>or by adding the style information directly to the relevant OBJECT tag.
>I'd argue that you're severely limiting the utility of OBJECT only if you
>don't *allow* the behaviour you want, and also allow the behaviour you
>don't want.

But this won't be true for embedded documents, which will be rendered in a
subwindow with its own default background.

David Perrell

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 1998 11:29:07 UTC