Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org> writes:

> Draft, but since the second Working Draft the spec introduced
> the Embedding Attribute Collection [1], which means any element can
> embed an external resource (such as image), not just 'object'.  Most
> simple image inclusions will be done through the 'src' and 'type'
> attributes, and only complex cases will be dealt by the 'object'
> element.
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-attribute-collections.html#col_Embedding 

Cute, but unwise.

I quote from the cited section 6.6:

: Examples:
: 
: <p src="holiday.png" type="image/png">
:     <span src="holiday.gif" type="image/gif">
:         An image of us on holiday.
:     </span>
: </p>
: 
: <table src="temperature-graph.png" type="image/png">
: <caption>Average monthly temperature over the last 20 years</caption>
: <tr><th>Jan</th><th>Feb</th><th>Mar</th><th>Apr</th><th>May</th><th>Jun</th>
:     <th>Jul</th><th>Aug</th><th>Sep</th><th>Oct</th><th>Nov</th><th>Dec</th>
: </tr>
: <tr><td> 4</td><td> 2</td><td> 7</td><td> 9</td><td>13</td><td>16</td>
:     <td>17</td><td>17</td><td>14</td><td>11</td><td> 7</td><td> 4</td>
: </tr>
: </table>

With this design a user agent will waste time checking for non-empty
values of the src attribute for *every* inline and *every* block level
element.

Doesn't processing strategy usually involve looking only at particular
attributes of interest based on the name of the element?

                                    -- Bill