Embed, Object, and Standards

When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.

My mission would lead me into the bowels of the Internet standards. I checked out the recommend article, but it was centered on movies and self created content. I wandered over to the w3schools, but only found a definition and nothing on converting from embed to object. After spending some time with Google search, I finally found the solution: Getting Flash to Validate. The article is a good discussion on how to convert between the non-standard and standard objects. Even better, the article included a specific example for converting the maps.amung.us code. After some cutting and pasting work, my site is once again validating and, even better, still working! Now, I know there are bugs in some implementations of the object tag, especially in older versions of IE and Mozilla. Hopefully this isn’t an issue for my one, or is it two, readers.