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If you have a look at the source for this page you will see that this page nests an object tag inside an object tag (instead of the time honoured method of nesting an embed tag inside an object tag). This complication is once again to cope with that most dreadful of browsers - Internet Explorer. Versions of IE before 5.5 were not standard compliant and required an activeX control. From 5.5 onwards both object impelemntations work and so a quirk of IE CSS is exploited to hide the second object and so avoid having two objects being displayed.
Note how alternative content is provided for browsers that do not support shockwave. This is, of course, essential to achieve WCAG AAA approval.
Thanks to Ross Angus for much of this page
Click here for his original article
Thanks to Mike Stanfill for the shockwave