Tutorial 12: Embed with HTML - Page 2 - HTML with Style

Tutorial 12: Embed with HTML - Page 2

Objective Needs

There are many reasons that you would want to embed objects in your documents but I can only think of two that make sense: (1) because the object in question represents something that cannot be represented using HTML, and (2) because you want to make your pages look better.

The first reason is perfectly legitimate and obvious. Most Java applets fall under this category, as do images that contain diagrams, figures, statistical charts, or anything else that cannot be represented in textual form. Here, most of the time, people who can't access the object will have to live with the fact that they can't get to the information. HTML allows you to offer an alternative description for the object or even an alternative object, and you should always use these, but most of the time it means that the information in the object can't get through to someone who can't view the object. This is not great, but there's little you can do about it.

In the second case, things aren't quite that simple. Here you use images to substitute a logo for a heading, add background music for spice, or embed Java applets that do cool but ultimately useless things. This is OK as long as you take a few precautions:

First, don't overdo it. Remember, people will always come to a Web page with interesting content regardless of how bland it is, but no one will take more than a cursory look at a page that looks like something out of your 3-year-old's finger-painting portfolio come to life. A little sprinkling of sugar will always help, but concentrate on saying something meaningful before worrying about dressing it up in pretty clothes.

Second, make sure it's obvious that the object in question is just there to add good looks so that people who can't see it don't feel cheated. This is surprisingly simple to do, and we'll have a look at how it's done later on.

And third, always make sure that the information is available in textual form as well. This isn't always easy, but I'll try to show you how it's done.

So, now that we've covered the theory, let's take a look at how it's done: our first look at the OBJECT element.

Elementary Objectivity

The OBJECT element

Context:

OBJECT is an inline element

Contents:

Can contain a number of PARAM elements. Other contents of the element are rendered only if the object itself cannot be rendered. Otherwise, they are ignored. You can nest multiple OBJECT elements.

Tags:

Both the start-tag and end-tag are required.

Produced by Stephanos Piperoglou

URL: https://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial12/2.html

Created: May 28, 1998
Revised: February 25, 1999