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Answer 1

+4 A:

This might not be an answer to your problem, but <embed> has never been part of any standardized version of HTML, says W3C.

some 2009-01-12 21:48:21

Very true, so +1. But unfortunately, people use it, and it's the source of a nasty bug that, in the right circumstances, cuts off all content after the unclosed <embed>. ;)

ojrac 2009-01-12 21:58:35

Not totally true anymore; `<embed>` has been added to the HTML5 spec. http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-embed-element

yc 2010-09-16 21:37:29

Wow, one should never say never...

some 2010-09-25 13:32:30

Answer 2

A:

Although <embed> is not a part of a standard html, it has been widely implemented and is, therefore, a de-facto standard.

That said, I'm running Firefox 3 (MineField v3.0.0.5) and am getting slightly unexpected, but altogether correct functionality. I was expecting the exact HTML to be put into the element I selected, but instead I got clean html.

Since <embed is an empty tag (that is, it cannot have contents, only attributes), Firefox turns this

<embed attribute="value"></embed>

into

<embed  attribute="value"/>

, which is a prefectly valid closed tag. It does the same on other empty tags, such as <input /> and <image>

At the this page you can see this in action. The scriptless version of the page has an embedded video (youtube) inside of a bright pink div. The script steals its contents and places it into the body as innerHTML.

yaauie 2009-01-12 22:04:40

I was under the impression that a de facto standard was a standard that was nearly universal. However, given that object (the standard version) is just as widely supported and used quite a bit, I wouldn't consider embed is a de facto standard.

R. Bemrose 2009-01-12 22:19:02

Answer 3

+1 A:

Alan Storm 2009-01-13 08:05:04

The problem you are referring to is that script-tags can't contain any tags and that the parser sees the start of the end tag: "</". If you had used the format "<element><\/element>" in your document.write it had worked.

some 2009-01-13 11:16:12

As I understand it, that'd just evaluate to "<embed></embed>" before assignment, the same thing that fails.I've also tried stuff like innerHTML += "</embed>".Trying to break the assignment into multiple lines (like `innerHTML += "</embe"`) just throws errors.

ojrac 2009-01-13 15:24:17

Weird, sorry about that. I thought I'd run though a bunch of tests, but it's not working now. I'm fired.

Alan Storm 2009-01-13 18:52:34

You gave me another idea to test, though. Those are always good.We could always put in a feature request for a "Mail Goggles" style SO feature: Solve some addition/programming puzzles in under 60 seconds to post! ;)

ojrac 2009-01-13 22:46:52

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What's up with innerHTML and <embed>?

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