On 9/18/09 10:21 AM, Michael A. Puls II wrote:
Attaching a test.
Thanks for doing that!
In Opera:
If you switch the display to none, it destroys the plug-in instance.
Setting the display to something else again doesn't restore the previous
plug-in instance. It creates a new one that starts playing from the
beginning.
However, switching between inline, inline-block, block and table just
changes the display and the plug-in keeps playing the file.
Gotcha. Note that due to the way style changes tend to be processed in
browsers this leads to bizarre behavior where exactly how you do your
switching matters. For example, in your testcase in Opera if I do this:
document.getElementsByTagName('object')[0].style.display="none";
document.getElementsByTagName('object')[0].style.display="block";
while the video is running, the video doesn't restart. However if I do:
document.getElementsByTagName('object')[0].style.display="none";
document.body.offsetWidth;
document.getElementsByTagName('object')[0].style.display="block";
then the video does restart.
Note that Gecko and Webkit suffer from a similar inconsistency as long
as the display value was "block" before the two lines above; if it was
something else the video restarts no matter what, as you noted.
Once the <object> is shown for the first time, you can set its display
to none, inline, inline-block, block and table and it will just change
the display while letting the plug-in keep playing. This means that
setting the display to none won't destroy the plug-in instance like it
does in other browsers.
In other words, there's hysteresis. The DOM state doesn't uniquely
describe the document state...
So, is it IE's behavior we want here, or Opera's?
In my opinion, neither. We don't want to have plug-in instantiation
depending on the CSS box model at all (and want to instantiate even if
display is "none"). If that's not feasible, then IE's model is imo
preferable to Opera's "sometimes it'll restart sometimes not" model....
Or, are you saying that the <object> should also load the plug-in even
when its display is set to none by default?
That seems like the most self-consistent approach to me.
-Boris
