Re: OBJECT, inheritance, and rendering

James Aylett wrote:

>> 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.

I'm not convinced it's the desirable way of doing it. Although an embedded
text/html document can define its own background to correspond with the
parent, if that background is a repeated image it can't reliably be made to
align. Having OBJECT determine the embedded window's default background
gives much more control over appearance.

OTOH, can the default window be synthesized? With CSS2's 'Window' color
value the 'base' default window background could be synthesized, but what if
there are user overrides or a user stylesheet?

It appears that the spec only declares "documents" as being entirely
independent, so the treatment of images and other datatypes is still up to
the UA. I seriously doubt any one will kill the usefulness of transparency
in images by forcing a default background.

David Perrell

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 1998 12:34:28 UTC