Playing videos in xhtml transitional

Design & UX
1

I am learning how to play videos on my web site. Below is some code that when run it show the page but it does not play. I am trying to come up with something that will play on
the four major browsers with the least amount of trouble on my part. I have read about 20 or 30 tutorials and I want write the code for the largest audience possible. I know there are many players out there and I am trying to hone in the the player or players that most people are likely to have. The code below uses quicktime. This may not be the best way to go. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Texas Pete


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Chicken Lick'en Good!</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="description" content="Chicken Little Know How" />
<meta name="keywords" content="None" />
<meta name="Author" content="Chicken Little" />
<meta name="Generator" content="ChickenLittle" />
<style type="text/css" >
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {text-align:center;display:none }
* {margin:0px;padding:0px}
body {background-color:rgb(255,255,255) ;}
body {font-size:100%;width:100%;height:100%}
body {display:block;position:absolute;visibility:visible;cursor:auto}
p {letter-spacing:normal;white-space:normal;text-align:left;letter-spacing:0em;word-spacing:0em}
#id1CkN{position:absolute;left:100px;top:300px;width:800px;height:400px;z-index:1;background-color:rgb(253,251,153);border:3px;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(123,148,255); }
#id1CkN{position:absolute;left:100px;top:300px;width:800px;height:400px;z-index:1}
a:link {color:rgb(249,90,97);}
a:hover {color:rgb(237,145,33);cursor:pointer }
a:active {color:rgb(100,42,255);}
</style>
</head >
<body >
<div id="id1CkN" >
<object data="pictures/planesfireandrescue-tlr2_h720p.mov" id="PlayerZ" classid="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" >
<param name="src" value="pictures/planesfireandrescue-tlr2_h720p.mov" />
<param name="autoplay=" value="false" />
<!--[if !IE]>-->
<embed src="pictures/planesfireandrescue-tlr2_h720p.mov" width="800" height="400"autoplay="false" Controller="true"
pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
</embed>
</object>
</div >

</body ></html >
2

Why did you opt against Flash Player?

3

I have not opted out of flash player. I am building my own wysiwig page maker. Any info you wish to share would be greatly appreciated. I can’t program them all but I am trying to get media play , Flash, and quicktime at least so that people will have a few options. I make even make it where people can program there own if it is viable in a file. i believe I have quicktime working in all five major browsers now.
Texas Pete

4

get rid of the classid attribute from the object tag - that is for IE6 only and prevents it working in more modern browsers.

get rid of the embed tag completely - once you have got rid of the classid the only browser that would need it is Netscape 4.

5

Felgall, Thank you very much. Doing the research for 10 years of of browsers . Is a heck of alot of work. I did test the code the five modern browser. Firefox , ie ,opera and chrome. You are saying that it will run without the class attribute for object tag and I don’t need the embed tag. I am running xhtml transitional. I thought I needed it.
Texas Pete

6

I have a comparison of the three different ways to attach a video IE4/Netscape 4, HTML 4 and HTML 5) at the top of http://www.felgall.com/htmlt180.htm

Basically

<object classid=“”> is for IE4 through IE6,
<embed> is for Netscape 4 (and will work in other browsers but not in some versions of IE)
<object type=“”> is the HTML 4 standard way that works in all browsers more modern than IE6 and Netscape 4
<video> is the HTML replacement that does away with the plugin.

If the embed tag is the only HTML 3.2 tag that you are still using in the page then you might be able to finally complete transitioning from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4 and update the doctype the the HTML 4 strict one (the one that indicates that the page no longer contains any HTML 3.2 tags).

Its amazing how many people haven’t finished transitioning from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4 given that HTML 4 became a standard in 1997 whereas lots of people are already moving to HTML 5 when it isn’t even a standard yet.

7

Thank you Felgall,
I have already written the code in such a way as I can turn it strict with just the Doctype change. With minor changes using he video tag and audio tag it would met html 5 standards. I was not willing to go that far however, because as you say, I also new that html 5 was to new yet. I will update the code as you have described .

8

Felgall , I looked at your link and downloaded the page . It was interesting . w3c schools did not have that example on html 5. Did you arrive at that example thru your own testing?
My little program is currently about 8000 lines. Naturally, me being only a one man programmer I can’t include every feature that the premium programs do. I was simply going to
give my little program away. I am trying to make a painstaking effort to make what I have written work well for what it does. Thanks for the input.

Texas Pete