Internet Explorer

More Evidence That IE Isn't Ready for Release as a Web Browser

July 26, 2006

I remember reading about the double-nesting object tags with an image inside. I like it. Since I don't have the quicktime plugin, but do have a 3rd party [program] to view them... Elliot Schlegelmilch
July 26, 2006

Yeah. That was an interesting one. I was going through thinking:

1. there needs to be a standards compliant way to post non-'text-and-gif' content to a site
   and
2. there needs to be a browser independent way of handling plugin detection to hand-off a non-media piece other than using javascript.

um... and there is. Unfortunately, though it was proposed by M$, IE doesn't fully support it yet, so you can't do multiple nesting like you should be able to. According to the spec, you should write something like:

<object for flash>
  <object for QT>
    <object for Windowsmedia>
      <object for image>
        fall-back text or HTML
      </object>
    </object>
  </object>
</object>

This allows you to put the preferred method of delivery in the outer container and put a whole series of alternates for different delivery vectors. The UA is supposed to check the outer one, and play that if possible, then go in and check that one, and stop as soon as it finds something playable. Web browsers do this. IE, on the other hand, renders all it can and renders broken plugin errors for the ones it can't. All of them. In a column. It's annoying. Instead of fixing this, they wrote a special type of comment so you can comment out the children for IE and let browsers that support the internet handle them correctly...

Not that I'd get bitter about it. It would be nice if M$ would get around to releasing a web browser that's ready for at least the '90s...