When I was building this blog I came across an interesting problem. I wanted to include some of my video projects as Youtube clips but noticed that the default embed code that Youtube offers isn't valid xhtml.
Youtube offers something like this:
<object width="425" height="350">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed>
</object>
After a bit of playing around, I found that what I really needed was something more like this:
<object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
width="425" height="350">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"/>
</object>
The next hurdle was RSS; Valid RSS doesn't allow <embed> tags at all. I removed them from the output of my RSS generator but I still wanted to show some sort of preview of the missing Youtube embed. Thankfully, Youtube offers a default preview image for all uploaded videos and so given iJ6JjzfZ2PM as an example video id, the image would be:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/iJ6JjzfZ2PM/default.jpg
That image comes out something like this:
The preview image for a Youtube clip.
So with all that sorted, now I can have my Youtube and my validation 