oEmbed: Represent embedded media
Markus Thielmann — Sat, 2008-05-10
oEmbed is a draft for an multimedia embedding standard.
In short, it's an easy way to discover the type (e.g. video, image) and the dimensions (hight, width) of a multimedia object referenced by a single URL.
So instead of allowing your users to embed (X)HTML and JavaScript into your blog system or forum, you just let them copy a link to it.
While I generally like the idea of having an open standard for such tasks, I really dislike the way oEmbed handles flash videos:
Request:
http://lab.viddler.com/services/oembed/?url=http://www.viddler.com/explore/cdevroe/videos/424/
Response:
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="437" height="288" id="viddlerplayer-1646c55">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.viddler.com/player/1646c55/"/>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/>
<embed src="http://www.viddler.com/player/1646c55/" width="437" height="288" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" name="viddlerplayer-1646c55"/>
</object>As you may notice, Viddler returns a non-standard HTML-snippet for inclusion with your site. This makes the whole "open standards" approach of oEmbed look a bit strange.
It would have been better to just provide a link to the relevant swf file, instead of injecting some awkward code into the consumers system.
I'm really hoping oEmbed is going to rethink it's response specification, or at least extend it with enough information to provide a base for a (X)HTML conform inclusion of the multimedia content.
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