RE: [css-regions] IFrame as flow content and fallback content

Getting content indirectly is certainly an important feature. In fact in IE10 (as of latest public build) IFRAME is the only way to provide content for named flow.

We have removed the special case for Iframe from css3-regions though, because we have agreed that there needs to be a cleaner way to get named flow content indirectly. I have an action to propose a different solution.

As far as fallbacks go, having something that will show while content is loading seems useful, but it is not specific to regions, is it? Same applies to regular IFRAME… I think if that kind of behavior is desired in CSS or HTML, it should be done at the level of the elements that load external content (IFRAME) and regions won’t need anything special to make it work.

From: François REMY [mailto:fremycompany_pub@yahoo.fr]
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 6:52 AM
To: CSS 3 W3C Group; vhardy@adobe.com; Alex Mogilevsky
Subject: [css-regions] IFrame as flow content and fallback content

Hi all,

While I didn’t see (in the current draft hosted on w3.org) a reference to the use of IFRAME, OBJECT, EMBED, LINK or @flow as flow content for a region, I remember clearly this was discussed in the past.

That feature seems really attractive to me, but I’ve come to an issue: while the resource is still loading or if the resource fails to load, how can we define a “fallback” content that will be sent to the flow instead? Can we rely on some sort of fallback chain?

I know the OBJECT tag already allow some sort of fallback content but doesn’t allow granular control about that fallback (what if the OBJECT is still loading, failled to load, has content which wasn’t recognized or has content that is not accepted as a flow content).

This can be an issue for real-world usage of the feature, I think. If those use-cases are targeted, that issue should be fixed somehow.

Best regards,
François