> Consider the following fragment:
>
> ----------
> <P
> >The following region contains an applet<BR
> ><IMG ALIGN="TOP" SRC="http://my.host/path/to/applet"
> ></P
> >
> ----------
That's really weird formatting, incidentally.
I had charitably assumed that the TAGC characters had been rearranged
by an overenthusiastic mailer seeking inventive ways to flag cited
text :-) You should see some of the crap my users produce...
I'm not persuaded that this is the right way to go about
applet implementation. If you view an applet as just a
fancy way to produce an image on your page, then sure, this
makes sense, but my impression of the applet concept is that
it goes beyond simple image generation. Downloading an
applet from a remote site permits the browser to execute
some arbitrary chunk of code, but it doesn't seem to me that
the function of the applet is limited to producing images.
If that's indeed the case, I don't like overloading the
<IMG> tag this way.
I think what we're seeing is the pragmatic approach, using existing
functionality even if it's not nicely named. Yes it would be better if
we could say <?foobar> (because we are introducing an object with a
life of its own here) and maybe HTML4 will allow for this, but right
now we need a stopgap. I know they have a nasty habit of becoming
permanent, but I don't see any other way out.
Or maybe we should just rename FIG to OBJECT and move the SRC of the
IMG to an attribute of OBJECT...
///Peter