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Embedding Objects

While what we've looked at in HTML so far, such as links, tables, and forms, offers a lot of important functionality, there are still many things that can't be achieved with just HTML alone. What happens if we want a movie embedded in our web page, or an audio MP3 file? In the first days of the web, we could do little more than browse hyper-linked text pages with the very occasional image if we were lucky. With HTML 2.0, we could only insert images, videos, sounds, and text. This improved further with HTML 3.2, but to add anything more, such as simple animated messages, spreadsheets, word documents, or even full 3D renderings of landscapes, we needed to insert them as objects.

HTML 4.01 allows for this by making the <object> element the standard way of doing this. Previously, the placement of objects in web pages was supported in a mish-mash of standard and non-standard ways. Indeed, the <object> element supercedes the <applet>, <embed>, and <"img"> elements, as well as Microsoft's <bgsound> element and dynasrc attribute. The <object> element is mainly used for content types the browser can't handle itself, and therefore an <object> element needs to provide both the data to be displayed and the plug-in that handles the display of the data. <object>, in theory, provides a single way to embed a whole range of objects into web documents, and offer more universal, cross-platform support for HTML pages.

However, a major source of disappointment is that the <object> element, despite being the standard way of doing this, was until recently, only really available in Internet Explorer. This is because the plug-ins needed to support many objects are not often universally cross-platform compatible. Netscape 6 goes part of the way to rectifying this, by adding support. Despite this, though, in the early versions of Netscape 6 (6.0 and 6.01), support for the <object> element when adding anything other than images, was erratic verging on non-existent at times. However, in the more up-to-date Mozilla milestone builds (0.8 and beyond, which form the basis for future Netscape releases), many of these problems have been resolved, and <object> will therefore work properly in the next major upgrade to Netscape 6 expected in summer 2001. Also, other browsers such as Opera 5, and older browsers like Netscape 4 still have limited support for this element and rely entirely on the old <embed> element to enable components.

Note: HTML 4.01 Programmer's Reference

Authors: Stuart Conway, Gary Damschen, Cassandra Greer, Dan Maharry, Simon Oliver, Sean Palmer, Jon Stephens, Chris Ullman

Publisher: Wrox

Published: June 2001

ISBN: 1861005334