Re: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering

On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, David Perrell wrote:

> 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."

Hmm. This suggests to me that something beyond OBJECT is perhaps required
to give the effect of dependence on the OBJECT's parent styles (and the
OBJECT's styles themselves).

> 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.

I'd say it probably is.

> But non-documents must be treated differently,
> e.g.: for an image the background can be determined by the embedding
> document.

My point is this: why should images get treated specially? "Because they
can be transparent" isn't really good enough, because so can HTML
documents. Fundamentally I don't see a big difference between images and
HTML documents - they should be treated the same way.

(Apart from anything else, it makes the rules considerably simpler by
virtue of being consistent.)

> >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.

Fair enough. Question is: why is this the desirable way of doing it, given
that its effects could be synthesised if it were done using the
alternative behaviour - where there exists an element (similar to OBJECT,
but clearly different as the spec. says that OBJECT behaves in this way)
which isn't a totally independent window onto its embedded content.

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 12:53:12 UTC