The OBJECT Tag

The OBJECT tag is still allowed by eBay (though I cannot for the life of me think why since there is at least one CERT alert issued in its regard) when the IFRAME tag is not, but it is not without it's problems. Often, and for no apparent reason, it forces the viewer to the auction list page only, and not the auction listing itself.

I've been poking around for the reason for this and suspect it is due to the failure to use the TYPE attribute appropriately. You might want to be sure that attribute is included like this:

<OBJECT TYPE="text/html" ALIGN="baseline" DATA="http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&include=0
&userid=eBayUserID&sort=3&rows=200&since=-1" WIDTH="600" HEIGHT="250" BORDER="1"></OBJECT>

Further, OBJECT is problematic because although it is now a fully certified real HTML tag, it used to be a browser specific tag with a completely different set of attributes. Older MSIE browsers may render it differently and older Netscape and others not at all. You can help older browsers that don't recognize it by using the full tag pair, both the <OBJECT> tag and the closing </OBJECT> tag with this text in between:

<A HREF="http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=ebayuserid&rd=1">click here to see my other auctions</A>

This will only show up (and instead of the full chart) if the OBJECT tag is not recognized by the browser.

(in both examples above replace the part in red with your own eBay user ID)

It's always the right time to use good code!

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