[development] xhtml and embed tag: best way to compliance?

[Fabio Varesano]

Thank you Karl.
After some more research I understood that your solution is the best.

I'm currently implementing it in my video module.

As soon as I finish the implementation I will post to this list asking
to people to try playing videos of all different formats.
This will helps finding incompatibilities between different browsers
and plug-in versions or vendors.

A huge thank you.

Fabio Varesano

Karl Rudd wrote:
> I ran up against this a while ago and through a tonne of research this
> is what I have come up with. It's not exactly pretty but it works
> everywhere, including in XHTML Strict.
> 
> Note the, of course, for Quicktime, Real, etc objects you'll have to
> change the "type" and "classid" values.
> 
> <!--[if !IE]> <-->
> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100" height="100"
> data="flash.swf">
> <!--> <![endif]-->
> <!--[if IE]>
> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100" height="100"
> classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
> codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
> 
> <![endif]-->
>    <param name="movie" value="flash.swf" />
>    <p>Alternative content.</p>
> </object>
> 
> Basically you're providing IE with an alternative version of the
> opening OBJECT tag.
> 
> Additionally to deal with the whole "Click to interact with ActiveX
> control" thing I have, wrapped in conditional comments for "IE only",
> an external Javascript.
> 
> <!--[if IE]><script defer="defer" src="iefixes.js"
> type="text/javascript"></script><![endif]-->
> 
> Please note the "defer" attribute, it's very important. Basically it
> makes the script run after the page body has completed parsing, but
> while images, objects, etc are still loading.
> 
> In the "iefixes.js" file I have code like this:
> 
> var objects = document.getElementsByTagName( 'object' );
> for ( var i = 0; i < objects.length; i++ )
>    objects[ i ].outerHTML = objects[ i ].outerHTML;
> 
> And that's it.
> 
> As I said, it's not pretty but it's the "least ugly" and the "least
> intrusive" way I could find to implement all of this.
> 
> Karl Rudd
> 
> 
> Fabio Varesano <fabio.varesano at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I'm working on making my video module full XHTML compliant.
>>
>> At the moment the module uses a lot of embed tags for displaying video
>> content (Quicktime, Flash, Wmv, Real, etc...).
>>
>> The problem is that embed tags are NOT part of any W3C standard and
>> make a Drupal site which uses the Video module NOT W3 standard compliant.
>>
>> W3 compliant tag for embedding videos on xhtml pages is object but
>> it's not well supported by Internet Explorer... so an object only
>> implementation is not possible.
>>
>> So I investigate on some work around to create valid code but still IE
>> compatible..
>>
>> And I finally get some types of solutions:
>> 1 - Javascript hacks:
>> basically leave only the object tag then onLoad add the embed tag to
>> the document.
>> 2 - CSS Tricks
>> creating two nested objects then use some css hacks to hide one
>> 3 - Extending XHTML
>> extends default XHTML dtds to create a custom made embed tag
>>
>>
>> While the first and second solutions are only hacks and are prone to
>> errors and incompatibility between current and future versions of
>> browsers, the third solution is much more elegant and should be
>> supported by future versions of browsers without giving us headaches.
>>
>> So.. IMHO the best way in doing this is solution 3.
>>
>> Extending XHTML can be done in two ways:
>> - creating a custom made DTD
>> - extending an existing DTD by adding new rule as an internal subset
>> directly in the document
>>
>> The problem is that using a customized DTD will produce a document not
>> validable by W3C validator.. Other validators can be used.
>>
>> Instead extending DTD directly on document will create a W3 validable
>> document but browsers (even firefox 1.5) will display a "]>" on the
>> first line of the page...
>>
>> So... I'd like to hear your suggestion in facing this problem.
>> For me the DTD extension on document is the best solution but I need
>> to find some hacks to let browsers hide the "]>"...
>>
>> What do you think about this???
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Fabio Varesano
>