Netscape and MSIE encapsulate plugin/embedded objects in a different way. In MSIE they are objects of the EMBED class. In Netscape they are objects commonly referred to as belonging to the Plugin class.

Because of this, and because each browser supports different properties and methods for them, they will be discussed here as Embed objects for MSIE and Plugin objects for Netscape.

Warnings:

• Note that Netscape can talk to the plugins that are encapsulated with an <EMBED> tag, but the MSIE browser cannot. However MSIE will talks to plugins that are encapsulated with the <OBJECT> tag. Netscape has supported <OBJECT> tags, but somewhat unreliably. Version 6 should be more robust.

• The Macintosh platform does not support the <OBJECT> tag because the MSIE browser really expects and hopes that it will be used to encapsulate an ActiveX object. Since ActiveX objects are written to be compiled into X86 machine code, they can only be used on a Wintel platform.

• Because of this, the MSIE browser on the Macintosh does support some limited communication with <EMBED> tag plugins.

• Trying to find a platform and browser portable compromise for embedding plugins (especially for video playback) is an utterly lost cause right now. You will have to write browser specific modules and use the appropriate one.

Inheritance chain:

Element object, Node object