oEmbed is a brand-new spec, announced by Cal Henderson (Flickr), Mike Malone, Leah Culver (Pownce), and Richard Crowley (OpenDNS). oEmbed is an open format for standardizing how images, videos, links, or other media get embedded, and for sidestepping media providers’ APIs (or the screen scraping you’d need when they don’t have one). When a user posts a link that points straight at a specific media resource, it lets a site embed that media quickly and painlessly. Here’s how it works: it converts the link accordingly — that is, it turns the image or video into XML or JSON that tells you how to embed the media.

While working on the test-paper composition system today, I ran into a problem: FLASH was covering the floating layer. No matter what I did, it always rendered on top and simply could not coexist with the layer. So I went searching, and finally found a good fix: the key parameter that keeps Flash from blocking floating objects or layers is wmode=opaque. How to do it: for IE, add the parameter inside ; for FF, add the parameter wmode=”opaque” inside .