I went in search today on ways of making the <embed> tag comply to the XHTML 1.0 spec. The <embed> tag is the tag which is commonly used in Flash content, for example it is used by IE to parse the SWF file to the browser. The SWF movie consequently doesn’t “stream” through the content but rather “passes” it.
The dilemma with this situation is that the <embed> tag isn’t correct spec syntax of XHTML and consequently renders all flash movies who use the tag non accessible.
I came across an interesting article/forum post in A List a Apart which commented thoroughly on hacks and possible ways of getting around this.
Paul J White commented on an alternative which Jeffrey Zeldman found to work best.
I thought I’d post the comments here for future reference when developing with Flash and the <embed> tags.
It is important to note that XHTML 2.0 is a still a working draft
www.alistapart.com/stories/flashsatay/discuss/3/
Further to the above forum posts, I came across the following article which commented more on the embed tag and referenced the Appendix C of the XHTML recommendation:
http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2002/svg-object.html