Re: Should <img> exist at all?
David Koblas (koblas@netcom.com)
Thu, 17 Nov 1994 14:53:02 -0800 (PST)
> It strikes me that <img> is a very limiting concept and not in keeping
> with either the generalized attribute mechanisms available in HTML or
> the philosophy of providing multi-platform, multi-capability support.
>
> In particular, the use of something like:
>
> <a href="...." inline=true>Alternative HTML</a>
>
> would provide a much more flexible model. Any type that
> is defined could potentially be inlined, and a viewer that was
> not capable of inlining the document would have the option of the
> displaying the alternative and/or giving the user a chance to
> display it externally. Alternatives could even potentially
> recurse, although I'm not sure that's a _positive_ feature.
Such things would be very nice to have, it was part of the
basis of my <IF ...> markup. Though instead of overloading
the present <A ...> tag, it would be better to create a new
tag:
<IMBED HREF="..." TYPE="mime type information" ...>
Alternate content
</IMBED>
This way if your browser didn't fetch the object it could
know what kind of object it was (display that audio icon).
Or pre-create a movie player "shell".
I would like the ability to _mix_ document formats, have
HTML documents contain RTF and PDF along with audio and
video.
--koblas@netcom.com
ps. It should be defined to recurse...
It would allow for an easy way to create "open on the fly"
menus, where the lists of objects inside were in an IMBED tag.