embed vs object

Question

Which is the right best tag to use in my HTML file when I want to display the Adobe PDF viewer   Right now I m using the code below  but there are weird side effects  e g  it seems to steal the starting focus that I ve set to another  lt input gt  text box  it doesn t seem to play real well with the jQueryUI Resizeable class  etc     lt embed src  abc pdf  type  application pdf    gt    Could I even do the same thing with the  lt object gt  tag   Are there advantages disadvantages to using one tag vs  the other

User · Answer

Probably the best cross browser solution for pdf display on web pages is to use the Mozilla PDF.js project code, it can be run as a node.js service and used as follows

<iframe style="width:100%;height:500px" src="http://www.mysite.co.uk/libs/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file="http://www.mysite.co.uk/mypdf.pdf"></iframe>

A tutorial on how to use pdf.js can be found at this ejectamenta blog article

User · Answer

Answer updated for 2020  Both  lt object gt  and  lt embed gt  are included in the WHAT-WG HTML Living Standard  Sept 2020     lt object gt   The object element can represent an external resource  which  depending on the type of the resource  will either be treated as an image  as a child browsing context  or as an external resource to be processed by a plugin     lt embed gt   The embed element provides an integration point for an external  typically non-HTML  application or interactive content     Are there advantages disadvantages to using one tag vs  the other   The opinion of Mozilla Developer Network  MDN  appears  albeit fairly subtly  to very marginally favour  lt object gt  over  lt embed gt  but overwhelmingly  MDN  wants to recommend that wherever you can  you avoid embedding external content entirely         you are unlikely to use these elements very much     Applets haven t been used for years  Flash is no longer very popular  due to a number of reasons  see The case against plugins  below   PDFs tend to be better linked to than embedded  and other content such as images and video have much better  easier elements to handle those  Plugins and these embedding methods are really a legacy technology  and we are mainly mentioning them in case you come across them in certain circumstances like intranets  or enterprise projects  Once upon a time  plugins were indispensable on the Web  Remember the days when you had to install Adobe Flash Player just to watch a movie online  And then you constantly got annoying alerts about updating Flash Player and your Java Runtime Environment  Web technologies have since grown much more robust  and those days are over  For virtually all applications  it s time to stop delivering content that depends on plugins and start taking advantage of Web technologies instead  Source  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Learn HTML Multimedia and embedding Other embedding technologies The  3Cembed 3E and  3Cobject 3E elements

User · Answer

Embed is not a standard tag  though object is  Here s an article that looks like it will help you  since it seems the situation is not so simple  An example for PDF is included

User · Answer

You could also use the iframe method  although this is not cross browser compatible  eg  not working in chromium or android and probably others -  instead prompts to download   It works with dataURL s and normal URLS  not sure if the other examples work with dataURLS  please let me know if the other examples work with dataURLS      lt iframe class  page-icon preview-pane  frameborder  0  height  352  width  396  src  data application pdf base64    DATAURLHERE       gt  lt  iframe gt

User · Answer

Some other options    lt object type  application pdf  data  filename pdf  width  100   height  100   gt   lt  object gt    lt object type  application pdf  data   request localhost  includes filename pdf           width  100   height  100   gt     lt param name  src  value   request localhost  includes filename pdf  gt   lt  object gt

User · Answer

OBJECT vs  EMBED - why not always use embed      Bottom line  OBJECT is Good  EMBED is Old  Beside s IE s PARAM tags  any content between OBJECT tags will get rendered if the browser doesn t support OBJECT s referred plugin  and apparently  the content gets http requested regardless if it gets rendered or not     object is the current standard tag to embed something on a page  embed was included by Netscape  along img  before anything like object were on the w3c mind   This is how you include a PDF with object    lt object data  data test pdf  type  application pdf  width  300  height  200  gt    alt    lt a href  data test pdf  gt test pdf lt  a gt   lt  object gt    If you really need the inline PDF to show in almost every browser  as older browsers understand embed but not object  you ll need to do this    lt object data  abc pdf  type  application pdf  gt       lt embed src  abc pdf  type  application pdf    gt   lt  object gt    This version does not validate

[html] <embed> vs. <object>

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