RE: Header, Footer, and Sidebars

Benjamin Franz wrote, at 8:46 -0800 on 26.11.97:
 
> On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Todd Fahrner wrote:
>
> > Ironically, the opposite is the case: because images are cached, while
>bits
> > of markup aren't, it can be faster over time to have persistent objects
>as
> > objects like images. "Client side include." With OBJECT you can refer to
> > another HTML file, but so far only IE4 seems to support this, and with
>some
> > quirks.
>
> Such as falling over dead (and leaving Win95 crippled (!!!)) if you
> include a page recursively into itself. %-)

Well, that's just mean, isn't it? <g> Anyway it's good to know that this
Operbrowser System isn't being used in hospitals or nuclear power plants or
anything important.

> MS appears to have implemented OBJECT as Yet Another Variation of FRAME.
> It presents the content as a web page in a box with scroll bars which
> cannot be eliminated by any method I have yet discovered and it ignores
> all the element attributes except HEIGHT and WIDTH.

They don't take well to positioning, either, viz:
http://www.verso.com/agitprop/objtest.html (I've left things a little messy)

> Both implementations of OBJECT are badly broken and impossible for general
> use because there seems to be no common sub-set of functionality between
> them. With stylesheets, you have to walk a razor thin line to make MSIE3,
> MSIE4 and NS4 all happy.

I agree mostly about stylesheets, and generally about the need for
improvement, but my tests suggest that you can use OBJECT markup today in a
highly degradable (universally pre-degraded?) way for some cases at least.
In the example above, everybody but IE4 sees just normal links to the
referenced HTML objects, and in this instance
<http://www.verso.com/agitprop/scale/> you see either the Flash object or a
GIF and some marked-up text telling you what you're missing.

__________________
Todd Fahrner
mailto:fahrner@pobox.com

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 1997 12:29:56 UTC