W3C Blog

Not IE though, eh?

Unfortunately, this example does not work in Internet Explorer 7 (what a surprise!). To top it off, the page stops loading at the point of the object element in the markup, without even rendering the fallback content (or anything else in the page, for that matter!).

It's ridiculous to think that in 2008, after nearly 9 years, Microsoft's current browser doesn't support the HTML 4 spec properly!

Anyone know how IE8 handles this?

You will probably be able to restore IE support by adding the param element with name="movie" back in.

Isn't the fallback you've used actually a caption for the video that would be useful even if the video worked?

You should test it in Google Chrome and see how it turns out.

Yup, specs have had a sketchy relationship with reality.... ;-)

When Netscape introduced browser scripting, it also introduced open rendering through plugins. This was invoked by the EMBED tag. Microsoft later had a parallel scheme, using ActiveX Controls and the OBJECT tag. W3C later blessed OBJECT and damned EMBED.

I asked repeatedly at the time, but no one really seemed to discuss what would happen with realworld content, realworld webpages, when EMBED was told to hie thee hence.

Now EMBED's back. Go figure. ;-)

Out in the real world, we start by looking at the engines a site's audience currently uses, and how to display to them. A few years back Drew McClellan tested how then-current browsers did with simple plugin visibility with OBJECT, but didn't check what that did with non-rectangular windows, layering, printing, JavaScript/plugin intercommunication, etc.

Simple specs without U-turns tend to work most smoothly....

jd/adobe

I don't have access to Google Chrome but if someone can describe if there are issues, please feel free to do so. Thanks.

@zcorpan. I guess, there should be plenty of more clever fallback than the one I have given here. What would you suggest?

@Toby: does it work with IE8 beta2. I have no access to IE but I have read that they started to fix the object element. I don't know to which extent. I will fix the param for movie. Thanks.

It works in Google Chrome.

IE8b2 works only if the movie param exists and the " entity is replaced with a quote character (see the data attribute). It continues to work in "Browser Mode: IE7", which is supposed to emulate IE7.

In IE6, the Flash Player plugin loads, but the movie does not. The method works for a local SWF file, but not for a video from YouTube. Even YouTube's suggested embedding code doesn't work in IE6.

If only I lived in a world where I could ignore IE. I could go home early every day! (But let's not loose site of how far we've come. I stumbled upon an article at A List Apart from many years ago that praised the high level of standards compliance in IE5.5!)

The article "Flash Embedding Cage Match" from A List Apart goes through many issues relating to Flash embedding. Their solution to the various compatibility issues is to use DOM scripting (SWFObject 2 came out of the process that followed that article).

It seems to me that the best fall-back content would be a transcript of the movie. Unfortunately, the effort required to create that is large.

Thanks Liam! That is super useful information.

I'm trying to get my websites optimized for Windows Mobile platforms as well when I switch from MAmbo to Joomla. Any pitfalls I should be aware of getting YouTube videos embedded on my sites?

Liam - your comment providing the info on flash embedding is great, was looking for more info and will give it a shot in Google Chrome.

thanxs 1st of all to make it simple. helped me a lot . u willfind a lots of vides now i wiill put it up here at Big Technical

Hi there, thank you very much for this. I had it down to 7 errors on my page and with your help, my page now validates!

I have only checked with Firefox and IE7, but it works fine with these two browsers. Once again, many thanks, Brian

Not working with IE 8.0.6001

Doesn't seem to be working in Firefox 3.1 beta 2 either :(

Work Perfect in FireFox. thank you so much for sharing!

I find this works well with Opera also. Thanks for sharing

I find this works well with Opera also, i will use in my website. thank you very much.

Working like a charm! I was looking for a simple way to embede some videos into my website.

Thanks!

This is really very simple and extremely useful. it is working great. thanks

Yes working perfectly, but I dont care about other browsers as long as it is running smoothly in Firefox.

thank you. It very uesful information for me.