While I was (and I still am at this point) checking my blog for XHTML validity, I found out that there are some validation problems if you have flash objects embedded the ‘old school’ way - meaning that you use a combination of “<object>” and “<embed>”. Unfortunately, still a lot of websites are offering this code, although the “<embed>”-tag is not supported by the W3C standard.

For (WordPress) templates, I found a nice workaround with the title “How to correctly insert a Flash into XHTML” on latrine.dgx.cz (I wonder if the blog owner knows what “Latrine” means in German, see de.wikipedia.org). The W3C validator says this code is valid.

Unfortunately, this method will not work with WordPress posts - I tried it, and the whole post got scrambled.

But there is a solution: try the “Kimili Flash Embed” plugin for WordPress - it makes use of javascript to embed the flash object, so you don’t have to worry about workarounds for the “<embed>”-tag.

I tried it on this post with some weird flash player code - and it worked: the plugin produced valid XHTML! What a pity that 5 minutes later I found the video on Youtube which is so much easier to embed.

[Update from 2007-10-24]
I noticed that the WordPress WYSIWYG-editor does not seem to like the “Kimili Flash Embed” plugin: after clearing the browser cache and a shift-refresh, the editor did not work: all the icons were gone. The Javascript console shows a “RealTinyMCE not defined” - I had the same issues before, see this post. So, I had to deactivate the plugin for now.

I have contacted the plugin author asking for a bugfix, let’s wait and see. Although I thought about just deactivating the editor several times, I realized that I still like it somehow.

Damn… everytime you find a nice plugin, there seems to be something going wrong.

[Update from 2007-10-30]
I have posted this issue on the WordPress forum.

[Update from 2007-10-31]
As I have not found any answer to that RealTinyMCE problem, I decided to comment out the code for adding the buttons to the WYSIWYG-editor within the “Kimili Flash Embed” plugin - and see: this workaround actually works around the problem!

Here is a “kimili-style” embedded Youtube movie:

[Update from 2007-12-12]
I just found out that if you want to embed movies with a URL like “domain/movie.swf?option1&option2…” with the Kimili Flash Plugin, you’ll have to set the MOVIE parameter to MOVIE=”domain/movie.swf” and put the rest into the FVARS parameter, like FVARS=”option1&option2…”.