<embed> tag in HTML not supported

Question

I get the following warning in a ASP.NET project using the <embed> tag to put a .swf:

Warning: Validation (XHTML 1.0 Transitional): Element 'embed' is not supported.

What is the "supported" way to do it instead???

Answer 1

The non-standard embed tag is not supported in XHTML in favour of the standards based object element. See http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=681 for more information on this, but in a nutshell:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="c.swf?path=movie.swf" width="400" height="300">
    <param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=movie.swf" />
    <img src="noflash.gif" width="200" height="100" alt="No Flash" />
</object>

Keep in mind though that using object doesn't always work correctly in older browsers, so do a bit of testing using both formats first. A List Apart has a brilliant article on this called "Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards" which shows you the cross browser way of implementing it as shown in the example above.