“Flash Satay’s” author Drew McLellan, in an article originally published in “A List Apart" writes, "embed" is not part of the XHTML specification and will prevent your page from validating. It is used by Netscape and similar browsers for displaying Flash movies. Parameters are passed within the element as name/value attribute pairs."

McLellan goes on to say, “Netscape created the "embed" tag as a way to embed plug-ins and players in web pages. The "embed" tag is not part of the XHTML specification, and although some browsers other than Netscape do support it, it’s not compliant with the standards, so you shouldn’t use it.”

‘O.K,’ I thought, ‘So there are some obstacles, but we’re getting closer to solving the problem. Our home page contains an embedded Macromedia Flash movie. The solution is to clean the markup and change some attributes.’

In a follow up to the Flash Satay article McLellan also states:“Flash has built in security measures which make life really tough. If the Flash player thinks the movie is being loaded from a different domain to that of the page in which it is embedded, it gives up and does nothing. It would also seem that it’s very easy to confuse the Flash player into thinking that this is the case. Flasher, beware!”

Hours later after cleaning up the markup and changing attributes, I thought my page was finally ready to be validated for W3C compliance. I found it worked fine in Netscape and Mozilla but when I tried it in Internet Explorer (IE) it stopped dead in its tracks.

Was it a security measure in the Flash Player that stopped the movie or the Internet Explorer setting up rules of their own?

All of a sudden memories of Netscape vs. IE back in the early 90s, when I started out as a web designer, flashed through my mind. Remember how CSS was only viewable in IE back then?