Alternative content for <applet>
Christoph Schneegans
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#edef-APPLET>
states:
"The content of the APPLET acts as alternate information for user
agents that don't support this element or are currently
configured not to support applets."
This works as expected in Opera 6.06. Opera 7.10, however, doesn't
display the content of the "applet" element if Java is disabled. It
only shows the value of the "alt" attribute. Of course, that's a
step backward since you can only use plain text in attributes, no
markup.
For example, I always recommend that FrontPage users provide
alternative content for their infamous hover buttons, like this:
<applet alt="Caption" code="fphover.class" width="120" height="24">
...
<param name="text" value="Caption">
<param name="url" valuetype="ref" value="foo.html">
<a href="foo.html">Caption</a>
</applet>
This works great in IE and Opera 6.06. In Opera 7.10, you will only
see the text "Caption", but you can't click it.
Is there any chance that future versions of Opera will deal with
<applet> as 6.06 did?
Richard Grevers
Known bug - the same problem exists for <object>. I'm confident it will be
fixed at some point.
--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
Christoph Schneegans
>> This works as expected in Opera 6.06. Opera 7.10, however,
>> doesn't display the content of the "applet" element if Java
>> is disabled.
>
> Known bug - the same problem exists for <object>. I'm
> confident it will be fixed at some point.
I hope so. However, Opera 7.10 now renders the value of the "alt"
attribute which is ignored by Opera 6.06. This implies that the
design change was intentional, not by mistake.
M Cowperthwaite
Me, I don't agree that it's a bug, for <APPLET>. The existence of the
'alt' attribute in the spec implies that if the browser understands
<APPLET> enough to parse it, it should not be displaying the content,
whether Java is enabled/available or not. The contents should only be
displayed by browsers that don't understand <APPLET>, of which there are
very few anymore.
However, I wouldn't complain if the content *were* displayed, so long as
any supplied 'alt' overrides the content. What I think is horribly lame
is using "Image" as the default 'alt' text for a disabled applet.
And not displaying the alternate content of <OBJECT>!! They just fixed
a related bug on that between 7.0 and 7.1, where an image-<OBJECT> was
displayed in the browser as both the image and the alternate. Somebody
there is *not* paying attention.
--
Michael Cowperthwaite
To send mail, remove 'Z's from the poster's email address.
Christoph Schneegans
> Me, I don't agree that it's a bug, for <APPLET>. The
> existence of the 'alt' attribute in the spec implies that if
> the browser understands <APPLET> enough to parse it, it should
> not be displaying the content, whether Java is
> enabled/available or not.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#edef-APPLET>
has not changed since my original post:
"The content of the APPLET acts as alternate information for
user agents that ... are currently configured not to support
applets."
That's absolutely clear, and it works in IE, Netscape 4.x and
Opera 6.x. For reasons that I don't understand, Mozilla and
Opera 7.x don't follow the specification.
> The contents should only be displayed by browsers that don't
> understand <APPLET>, of which there are very few anymore.
Why should a browser that is configured not to run applets
behave differently than a browser that isn't even aware of the
"applet" element und Java?
> However, I wouldn't complain if the content *were* displayed,
> so long as any supplied 'alt' overrides the content.
What do you consider a useful "alt" text for an applet? You can
hardly provide *alternative* information in an attribute value,
just phrases like "Please upgrade your browser!". That's not the
idea of a fallback mechanism.