Question

In HTML5, the object element now has a form attribute.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#attr-fae-form

This attribute associates the object element with a form. I’m trying to understand purpose (or result or impact) of this association. I’ve figured out a couple things:

1) It allows the object element to appear outside of the form element:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#new-attributes

2) It is used to construct the data set:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#categories

Is the object submitted with the rest of the form inputs? Does the server (to whom the form is submitted) now have access to this object (via POST) for processing? What am I missing?

Edit: Still hoping for answers for the 2 questions above regarding form submission…

Answer 1

From the W3 site, it sounds like this solves a pretty big problem with HTML4: “This feature allows authors to work around the lack of support for nested form elements.” http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#form-owner