I was working on a video player that had it’s controls rendered in HTML/CSS with Javascript hooks into a SWF file that actually streamed the video when I started looking at trying to use Object instead of an iFrame to display/share the project.  I read just about everything I could find on it:

After reading all of these articles and playing with the results I’ve come to a few conclusions:

  • IE doesn’t fully support object’s yet, no matter how you slice it.
  • Mozilla and the rest of the standards brigade don’t render the object when 
    classid="clsid:25336920-03F9-11CF-8FD0-00AA00686F13"

    is within the object tag.

  • External content can be pulled through into an object tag using the data attribute.

So here’s essentially what everyone’s code looks like:

<object width="660" height="399" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></object>

My problem? It doesn’t work reliably across all browsers. IE only renders it when it has a classid and the standards brigade doesn’t render it when it is there. There isn’t a solution that would allow a nice and tide sharing copy/paste line of text that works across all browsers like an iFrame…yet.  And in case you’re not following along, what I’m talking about is something like what YouTube does:

<object width="560" height="340" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/GggVSAPt-HY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GggVSAPt-HY&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /></object>

Microsoft, if you’re listening.  Please can you take a look at this and figure something out?  We’d all love to be standards compliant and strict even, but iframe is going the way of the dodo and object isn’t supported by that lovely browser that doesn’t seem to support anything cool.

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