html - <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 <input> text box; it doesn't seem to play real well with the jQueryUI Resizeable class; etc.)

<embed src="abc.pdf" type="application/pdf" />

Could I even do the same thing with the <object> tag? Are there advantages/disadvantages to using one tag vs. the other?

Answer 1

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:

<object data="data/test.pdf" type="application/pdf" width="300" height="200">
  alt : <a href="data/test.pdf">test.pdf</a>
</object>

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:

<object data="abc.pdf" type="application/pdf">
    <embed src="abc.pdf" type="application/pdf" />
</object>

This version does not validate.