Note: I'm not on the whatwg mailing list, so please cc me on replies.
Shadow2531 wrote:
If text/plain is sent, I expect it to fail unless you have a text/plain plug-in installed.
Does that match current UA behavior?
I think the type attribute should be required though
Again, does that match current UA behavior?
and things should fail if the type sent by the server doesn't match the type attribute.
Why?
Basically, the browser should follow the rules of the plug-in and only invoke the plug-in for types and extension the plug-in says it supports.
Sure, but the question is how one should decide what type to use for the data in question.
Your text/plain example is a good example. If you embed a .wmv file, we know no matter what it's sent as
It's sent as text/plain. Always. Thank you, Apache!
Making <embed src="testmovie.wmv"> ( sent as text/plain ) fail may seem evil, but it might be for the better.
Better what?
I'd like to forget about the embed element
Not acceptable -- <embed> is the one existing sanely cross-browser way of doing plugins.
( And explicitly say that it's O.K. for a UA to ignore a classid it doesn't support and use the data attribute instead, for Mozilla's benefit.)
Also not acceptable (speaking as a Gecko developer) -- we don't want to deal with the issue that will arise when content meant for ActiveX plugins gets sent to NPAPI ones, which have different bugs, etc. The current setup (where the site can choose which one to target and can easily target both), is quite nice that way.
-Boris
