The <param> element
While some object types are inherently simple and can be handled using the
basic <object> syntax, others are more complex and require more configuration
than the basic syntax can provide. The <param> element is a generic element
which allows the <object> element to feed configuration information to the object,
or more strictly the object handler in the browser. The <param> elements are
contained inside the <object> element.
The syntax for the <param element is:
<param name="xxx" value="yyyyy" />
'xxx' is replaced by the name of the parameter and 'yyyyy' is replaced by
the value you want to specify for the parameter. An example of this is when
using <object> to display a video file. The following code shows how <object>
can be used to display a Windows Media Video (WMV) file:
<object type="video/x-ms-wmv" data="resources/IceScraping.WMV"
width="320" height="285">
<param name="src" value="resources/IceScraping.WMV" />
<param name="autoStart" value="0" />
<param name="showControls" value="1" />
<p>Cannot play WMV files!</p>
</object>
The 'autoStart' and 'showControls' parameters are used to control the media
player. The 'src' parameter is used by some browsers to locate the actual
video to be played. Note: Firefox does not need the 'src' parameter, but
since the code needs to work in all browsers it should be included.
Resulting in:
In general you should always carefully research the required parameters
for a particular content type. See the
demonstration page for simple object syntax with parameters for a range
of content types.
Note: The parameters that are required my vary,
based on the actual plug-in used to display the embedded content. Since
the web-page author doesn't have control of the end users environment
this makes it difficult to produce a foolproof page for some media
types. For example, the playback of MP3 files can be done using the
Quicktime plug-in or the Windows Media Player plug-in on a Windows
machine. Quicktime uses 'true' and 'false' for boolean values, where
Media Player uses 1 and 0.