Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Adding parameters

These days, it is more common to see the object element used to place an ActiveX control (Internet Explorer’s version of plug-ins) than an applet. ActiveX controls are identified by the naming scheme clsid, followed by a long string of characters specific to the ActiveX control required to render the media object. ActiveX controls typically require additional settings used to control the display or playback of the object. These settings are provided by param elements as shown in this example for embedding a Windows Media movie.

<objectclassid="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" height="280"
width="320" codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/
en/nsmp2inf.cab#version=6,4,7,111">
   <param name="URL" value="movies/europe.wmv" />
   <param name="autoStart" value="false" />
   <param name="UIMode" value="full" />
</object>

Here, the classid attribute points to the ActiveX control for the Windows Media Player 9. The codebase attribute is intended to be used to provide a base path used to resolve relative URIs specified by the classid, data, and archive attributes. In practice, however, it has come to be (mis)used as a pointer to a location for downloading the current ActiveX control or plug-in if it is not installed on the user’s computer, as is the case in this example.

Within the object element, there are three param elements that pass important information to the ActiveX control. The parameters and values are provided by the name and value attributes, ...