Re: The EMBED tag by Netscape (v2.0)

murray@sq.com
Tue, 19 Sep 1995 14:05:51 -0400 (EDT)


Ka-Ping Yee replies:
> On Tue, 19 Sep 1995 murray@sq.com wrote:
> > Ka-Ping Yee writes:
> > >
> > > Certainly we have no reason to accept EMBED. It is not part of the
> > > standard, and never needs to be.
> > Who is "we"? And why does EMBED never need to be in the spec?
>
> I apologize for the excessively presumptive tone i used. Rephrased, i
> believe that there is no reason to introduce another tag, EMBED, to do
> (as a special case) something that A has always been able to do (the
> fact that practically no one has *yet* bothered to implement it the way
> Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived it is not relevant).

Is there a good reason not to introduce another tag?
>
> > The ability to do inclusion, via EMBED, is something that
> > has been asked for repeatedly for over a year now.
>
> If you mean the inclusion of arbitrary media types in a document, then
> <A HREF="..." REL="EMBED"> or the more specialized <FIG SRC="..."> can both
> accomplish this. Have i misinterpreted what this desired functionality is?

Yes, I am eminently familiar with REL/REV values,
but I note that there seems to be little interest
among Web browser developers to develop tools that
utilze REL/REV values. Several months ago I wrote
a paper which discussed the various ways that REL/REV
could be used. The SGML community received it well.
The HTML community did not. The fact that Netscape
has managed to get the job done without waiting for
this interminable standards process is no surprise.

Regards,

Murray

Murray Maloney
Product Manager
SoftQuad Inc.

Sponsor Member of the Davenport Group
Charter Member of the HTML Working Group
Chair, SGML Open Technical Committee on Styles