Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

ActiveX Controls and Plugins

ActiveX controls (formerly OLE controls) are reusable components that add functionality to Internet Explorer on Windows only. Macintosh browsers and Netscape Navigator for Windows use Netscape-style plugins to provide similar functionality. Many accessories, including Flash and Shockwave, are available in both forms to support all major browsers.

Warning

Whereas prior versions of Internet Explorer for Windows supported both ActiveX controls and Netscape-style plugins, IE5.5 SP2 and IE6.0 do not support Netscape-style plug-ins. They now require ActiveX controls exclusively.

The <object> tag is used to insert ActiveX controls. For Flash and Shockwave objects (which are available as both ActiveX controls and Netscape-style plugins), Dreamweaver automatically inserts both the <object> and <embed> tags (the latter is actually included within the <object> tag). Browsers that recognize the <object> tag, such as Internet Explorer for Windows, ignore the <embed> tag; browsers that don’t understand the <object> tag use the <embed> tag instead. Therefore, attributes not specific to one of the tags must be specified redundantly in both tags. (Example 5-1 demonstrates how attributes are specified, which differs slightly for each tag.)

The classid and codebase attributes are specific to the <object> tag. The classid uniquely identifies an ActiveX control, which is downloaded from the URL specified by the codebase attribute if it is not already installed. (The #version ...