The <EMBED> element allows authors to embed objects directly into an HTML page
The basic syntax is:
<EMBED SRC="_URL_">
where "_URL_" represents the URL of the object that is to be embedded.
The <EMBED> element will allow you to embed documents of any type. Your user only needs to have an application which can view the data installed correctly on their machine, or have a plug-in (for Netscape and Internet Explorer) that can manipulate the embedded file format.
The <EMBED> element can be used more or less the same as the <IMG> element and so accepts typical image embedding attributes such as WIDTH, HEIGHT, BORDER, HSPACE, VSPACE and NAME (for referencing the embedded object in a script function).
Netscape Plug-ins
Netscape plug-ins make use of the <EMBED> element. Essentially, plug-ins are dynamic code modules which are associated with a MIME data type that the Netscape client has no native support for. When Netscape encounters an unknown data type from a server, it will search for a plug-in that is associated with that MIME type and load it, enabling viewing/transforming of the data object.
Netscape now comes (if the standard version is downloaded) with some plug-ins pre-installed allowing the embedding of video, audio, VRML worlds and quicktime movies. The syntax for including any of these formats is as above.
For more information about plug-ins, see the Netscape web site. http://home.netscape.com/. Lots of plug-in modules are available, the additional attributes for which are beyond the scope of this document. The documentation with the plug-in should be consulted for useable HTML element attributes.
NOTE : Microsoft's Internet Explorer (from version 3.0 beta 2) fully supports Netscape plug-ins. When Internet Explorer loads a page designed to use a (Netscape) plug-in module, it will use either the correct plug-in, or a pre-installed ActiveX control to display the content as authored. Microsoft recently released the ActiveVRML and ActiveMovie add-ons for Internet Explorer which can handle VRML worlds, AVI, QuickTime, MPEG video/audio, WAV, Sun AU and AIFF sound files respectively, either using the respective ActiveX <OBJECT> code, or <EMBED> code as used by popular Netscape plug-ins.
Examples
Below is an example of an embedded MIDI file:
<EMBED SRC="clouds.mid" WIDTH="145" HEIGHT="61">