Posted by cwdjrxyz@yahoo.com on 12/28/05 18:37

Dung Ping wrote:

> Following your proposal, I changed the code to following:
>
> <embed
> src='http://www.ibiblio.org/chinese-music/Taiwan_Ceremonial/J02.Plums_March.au'
> loop='true' hidden='true' autostart='true'></embed>
>
> It works well on both IE and FF. I put a </embed> tag at the end, but
> understand it is not necessary. I wonder that since each opening tag
> needs to be corresponded by a closing one or close itself by </>, why
> is <embed> an exception, that is, no closing tag or self-closing slash
> is needed?
>
> I've also read your next posting, but would like to read and test more,
> as there are quite a few embed tags to play remote au files in my web
> site. Will post results this evening (U.S. east time).

Since the embed is not part of any official W3C version of html, there
can be no official rules for using it. It seems to work either with or
without a closing tag, when it works at all. Remember that some tags
such as img and br are not followed by a closing tag even in html 4.01.
Everything must be closed in xhtml, but for some tags such as img and
br that are not closed in html 4.01, they are closed in a special way
such as <br />. But if you use embed at all in either html 4.01 or any
version of xhtml, the code will never validate at the W3C validator,
because embed is not an accepted tag in modern html. The object tag,
used in a rather different way from how the embed tag was used by old
Netscape, now is used to embed things in modern code.Old code before
W3C html 4 that used the old Netscape embed tag usually did not close
the embed. Much media code developed on IE now uses an ActiveX object
to embed media. However not all browsers support ActiveX, and some have
it turned off. Media code can be written using an ordinary object that
supports most recent browsers without using either ActiveX or invalid
embed for browsers thst do not support ActiveX.Unfortunately even many
large companies still write invalid media code that includes both an
ActiveX and invalid embed path for browsers that do not support
ActiveX.

If you were to decide to use the WMP or Real audio formats, as I
mentioned, the free Windows Media Encoder that can be downloaded at
Microsoft will convert your other .au files to .wma. Also the free Real
Producer Basic 10 that can be downloaded at real will convert your .au
files to Real .rm audio files.

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