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Bug 25144 - While reading the spec for the embed element at <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/the-embed-element.html> I stumbled about this sentence: When the element is created with neither a src attribut [...]
Summary: While reading the spec for the embed element at <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-03-25 11:00 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2014-05-03 00:27 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description contributor 2014-03-25 11:00:52 UTC
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/Overview.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top
Referrer: 

Comment:
While reading the spec for the embed element at
<http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/the-embed-element.html> I stumbled about
this sentence:

When the element is created with neither a src attribute nor a type attribute,
and when attributes are removed such that neither attribute is present on the
element anymore, and when the element has a media element ancestor, and when
the element has an ancestor object element that is not showing its fallback
content, any plugins instantiated for the element must be removed, and the
embed element represents nothing.

And my internal stack protection immediately kicked in while trying to parse
it.

Can't you make this easier to parse correctly by braking it down to something
like this:

The plugin instantiated for the embed element must be removed and the element
must represent nothing:
* When the element is created with neither a src attribute nor a type
attribute, 
* when attributes are removed such that neither attribute is present on the
element anymore
* when the element has a media element ancestor, 
* when the element has an ancestor object element that is not showing its
fallback content

That seems much easier to parse as the action is clearly stated at the top and
then the preconditions are clearly listed at equal footing so it is easy to
see that they are all equally important and there is no nesting involved in
the conditions.

Posted from: 92.231.242.149
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.74.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.2 Safari/537.74.9
Comment 1 Martin Häcker 2014-03-25 11:08:35 UTC
Submitter here, now with account. :)
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2014-03-31 22:13:09 UTC
Yup, that should be easy to fix.

Note that you really don't want to be reading that version of the spec. The up-to-date version is at: http://whatwg.org/html
Comment 3 Martin Häcker 2014-04-01 07:52:13 UTC
Not sure if this is noteworthy, but ogling the spec it seems to me that this phrasing seems to occur in quite some places (though I'm not so sure it's exactly the same).
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2014-05-03 00:26:59 UTC
If you find any other parts that need clearing up, don't hesitate to file a bug. (You can trivially do so using the text entry widget at the bottom right of the canonical version of the spec: http://whatwg.org/html )
Comment 5 contributor 2014-05-03 00:27:20 UTC
Checked in as WHATWG revision r8602.
Check-in comment: Make this sentence about <embed> less convoluted.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8601&to=8602