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In-Depth Information
a key/value pair to the plug-in in question. Earlier, in the
embed
element section, there
was an example of using
embed
with a custom
loop
attribute to tell Flash Player to
loop its playback. This example could be rewritten using the
object
and
param
ele-
ments like so:
<object
data="game.swf"
type="application/x-shockwave-
flash">
<param name="loop" value="true" />
</object>
In this example, there are no custom attributes (unlike the analogous
embed
ex-
ample); instead, the custom settings are communicated through the
name
/
value
attrib-
utes on
param
.
It's unlikely that you'll ever be hand-coding the parameters for embedded plug-ins
(Adobe Flash, for instance, will generate the required
param
elements when you pub-
lish content out of the authoring environment), so I don't cover this sort of usage in great
detail here. Simply be aware that when embedding plug-in-based media, the
object
element is what you usually need to use.
___________
4
The object element was commonly used to embed YouTube videos, for instance (YouTube has
since moved to using iframe for embedding video on other sites).
To wrap up this discussion on embedded media, it's important to mention a feature
of the
object
element that came up earlier: the fallback content mechanism. How ex-
actly is this done? Well, it's quite intuitive and easy to implement. You can nest
object
elements (or other elements), allowing the web browser to display alternative content if
it cannot render the preferred choice. For instance, you can nest a video, an image, and
finally some text like so:
<object data="video.mpg" type="application/mpeg">
<object data="picture.jpg" type="image/jpg">
Some
descriptive
text,
and
<a
href="video.mpg">a download link</a>.
</object>
</object>
The user agent should first try to display the video, but if it can't, it should then try to
display the image, and if it can't do that, it displays the text—no need for
alt
attributes
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