CGI and Perl

Other Objects: Applets, Images, Animation, and the <EMBED> Tag

Suppose you want to embed other types of objects within your Web page. You can do this in HTML using the <EMBED> tag. Many different companies have extended the definition of this tag to suit their object's needs. This section briefly describes what kinds of embeddable objects are out there and how you might go about incorporating them into your page, using available Perl library code.

Some types of embeddable objects are provided as Netscape plug-ins through the <EMBED> tag. For example, you can embed an Adobe Acrobat PDF file into your Web page if you have the PDF plug-in. You can also embed AVI files using the sample AVI plug-in provided from Netscape. The next example shows how to do both.

<embed src=movies/sample.avi width=300 height=100>
 <br>
 <embed src=pdfs/sample.pdf width=300 height=300>

The Adobe Acrobat Netscape plug-in is available at http://www.adobe.com. The Netscape plug-in development kit can be found at http://home.netscape.com. There are plenty of other Netscape plug-ins available. To see a complete list, visit the Netscape software page at http://home.netscape.com/comprod/upgrades/index.html. Additionally, you can embed audio and various other types of multimedia objects with the <EMBED> tag.

Java has become a huge buzzword in the industry of late. One of the things Java provides is the capability to download an executable applet from a Web server to a client browser and run that applet under a secure environment. Applets can be thought of as small application components that are useful for a specific task. These applets can provide a higher level of interaction that allows for some interesting Web page content. Some interesting Java applets can be found at http://www.gamelan.com. Java applets are included within an HTML document using the <APPLET> tag, as follows:

<APPLET CODE=JavaApplet.class WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=200>
 </APPLET>

In this example, the Java applet is compiled into a file called JavaApplet.class, and when the browser loads the page containing this tag, JavaApplet.class will be downloaded and executed within the context of the browser.