Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

10.3. The Object Tag

The object tag (<object>) was introduced to replace both the <embed> and <applet> tag means of embedding objects (non-HTML content) within HTML documents. The <object> tag has the following syntax:

<object classid="class_id" id="object_id" codebase="base_for_object_code_URI"
  codetype="MIME_type_of_object" width="width_of_object"
  height="height_of_object" >
Alternate_text_for_object
  ...parameters...
</object>

The object tag encapsulates alternate text that is used if the object cannot be handled by the destination user agent and parameters defined by parameter tags (<param>).

The <param> tag is covered in the next section.

The object tag's attributes are listed in the following table:

Attribute	Value(s)	Use
archive	URL(s)	URLs to archives related to the object
classid	class_id	A URL to the implementation for the object
codebase	URL	A URL to the location of the code to utilize the object
codetype	MIME type	The MIME type of the object
data	URL	A URL to the object's data
declare	true | false	Determines if the object should only be declared but not initialized (true), or initialized and displayed after loaded (false)
height	pixels | percentage	The displayed height of the object
name	unique_name	A unique name for the object (used in scripting)
standby	text	Defines text to display while the object loads
type	MIME type	The MIME type of the data specified by the data attribute
usemap	URL	Specifies the location of a client-side image map to use with the object
width	pixels | percentage	The displayed width ...