Web Animation, Audio, and Video with EMBED
HTML Coder
By Philip De Lancie
The proliferation of formats for Web audio, animation, and video has made it impossible for vendors to integrate all-inclusive multimedia playback capabilities directly into their browsers. However, proponents of various media formats have developed their own plug-ins that work with browsers to deliver media to clients. If you plan to include multimedia in your pages, you'll want to become familiar with the EMBED tag, the most common means of invoking these plug-ins, directing them to media files, and specifying the conditions of display and playback.
The EMBED element is a Netscape HTML extension, but it also receives solid support (with some exceptions) in Internet Explorer 3.x. With the advent of HTML 4.0, the EMBED tagıs functions will likely be subsumed into the OBJECT tag, which W3C favors as a generic means of embedding data objects within a page. But for now, EMBED appears to be the tag most commonly recommended by plug-in vendors.
Because the EMBED tag is evaluated by both the browser and the plug-in, the specifics of its use vary depending on the media format (and associated plug-in) that you're trying to play back. This article looks at some general characteristics of the tag that apply across the board and presents examples of how the tag can be used with three different media-playing plug-ins: RealPlayer, Shockwave, and Beatnik.
EMBED from Square One
EMBED is a single-sided tag (for example, one with no closing tag required) with three required attributes.
