[9728] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Conditional HTML w/ (was: Microsoft IE)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Ornstein)
Mon Jan 29 15:27:15 1996
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 12:17:58 -0800
To: bsobilof@inet.ed.gov (Blake Sobiloff), www-talk@w3.org
From: David Ornstein <davido@apocalypse.org>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
At 02:47 PM 1/29/96 -0500, Blake Sobiloff wrote:
>At 1:12 PM 1/29/96, M. Hedlund wrote:
>[Description of <INSERT> structure]
>
>>Advantages:
>[...]
>>* Doesn't stuff all possible variants into one document (avoids filesize
>> bloat).
>
>I've heard a lot of people mention filesize bloat as a (potential) problem,
>but I wonder how much of a problem it really is. At least with the files I
>ride herd over, I doubt that many would more than double in size -- but
>then again, I'm pretty conservative with my document features, too.
I'm sure that many of mine would increase 10-fold at least. I do
User-Agent-based serving and the variations are pretty subtle sometimes.
For example, some browsers compress multiple tags down to one space
and some don't. The specs *seem* to say that compression is correct
behavior, but that's somewhat moot: there is currently a lot of variation in
how available browsers interpret this. To get the layout I desire (let's
not argue about conent vs presentation stuff, ok? it's been beat to death),
I have page fragments that are correct for browsers that do compress and
page fragments for those that don't compress. Using the proposed <INSERT>
construct, I'd have to translate:
Some text (OR Some text)
to (roughly):
<INSERT SRC="http://www.name.dom/uncompressBasedPage.html"
TYPE="text/conditional-html">
<PARAM NAME="condition" VALUE="vendor-compressnbsp/1.0">
Some text
</INSERT>
This is a pretty big increase in the actual size of the file.
Another disadvantage to this approach (as I started to realize in an earlier
message I sent and as someone just pointed out) is that it's biased towards
new browsers: old versions will never support the new construct. This is
good insofar as it encourages browser vendors to conform, but it's trouble
too 'cuz I can't do content negotiation with older browsers (as I can with
User_Agent).
>Also, how am I going to test each of the
>different structures -- keep copies of the top five browsers for each
>platform handy? Yuck! (Maybe my worry is just an artifact of the current
>(lack of) automated / advanced tools?)
BrowserCaps [see my .sig] helps, but doesn't truely allow for testing.
-----------------------------------------------------
David Ornstein
Outbreak: http://objarts.com/outbreak-unreg
BrowserCaps: http://objarts.com/bc
Personal Info: http://objarts.com/davido
