How embedding a video can fail the XHTML validation of your web site?

If you have been happily embedding videos from Youtube and other popular video sharing web sites into your blogs and sites, you should know that it can fail the XHTML validation of your site or the page that is embedded with the video clip. That’s true!

I had never thought about it but discovered it accidentally when as a part of my monthly website checkup, I tried to validate my site for XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it failed poorly. Looking at the validation output, the reason was very much evident. It was the code from Youtube that I had used to embed two video clips in my post on Hubble Telescope.

Why did it fail the XHTML validation? - Simply because embed tag is not a part of XHTML specifications and using this tag in your pages will fail the validation. This tag was initially used by Netscape to insert plugins and players in their browser and is also supported by all modern browsers. For further reading, refer to this article from A List Apart.

What did I do to correctly embed Youtube videos in my blog? - I used a plugin for WordPress called “WordPress Video Plugin” which helped me to a great extent by following XHTML standards while embedding video clips in my posts. The plugin doesn’t use the embed tag, instead solely relies on the object tag, to insert the video clip, which is very well in XHTML specifications.

If you have been inserting videos in your site and blogs, I highly recommend that you perform validation of your site and check the output for any validation errors.