XHTML 1.1 Object Tag Fix for IE7 and IE8

Recently, I upgraded one of my projects to XHTML 1.1 Strict. I have always liked XML, so XHTML Strict appealed to me. One issue I came across was that iframes had been deprecated. This made it difficult to use services such as Google Maps and reCAPTCHA. After searching the web, I found a useful article by Pop Labs (which is no longer online) that included a JavaScript solution. That approach did not quite work for me, so I decided to write my own using jQuery.

HTML

<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/xhtmlFix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

The HTML above makes the script run only on IE7 and IE8.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    /**
    * Replace each object with iframe.
    * Licensed under the MIT licence (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
    * Copyright (c) 2013 Jeremy Sells
    */
    if(jQuery("object").length > 0) {
        jQuery("object").each(function(){
            var frame = jQuery("<iframe src='"+jQuery(this).attr("data")+"' class='"+jQuery(this).attr("class")+"' id='"+jQuery(this).attr("id")+"'/>");
            jQuery(this).replaceWith(frame);
        });
    }
});

The jQuery above checks how many <object> tags are on the page and replaces each one with an <iframe> tag. It uses the <object> data value as the <iframe> source and keeps the CSS classes and ID, preserving the height and width.

Licensed under the MIT licence (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Published: 01/02/2013 UTC

Updated: 18/06/2026 UTC

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