Yesterday, I was reading a thread on evolt.org’s thelist, perhaps the oldest community of web designers and programmers around.

The topic of the thread was OpenID, the implementation of which on websites is one of the most contentious issues I’ve seen in a long time. Some of the input from the thread:

I have discovered OpenID,
Here is a link if you haven’t heard of it, http://openid.net/
I am un-sure at the moment whether this is a good secure service and I was wondering if any of you folks had any experience with this.

Last I checked, it was going to be too much of a headache for us to implement

I’ve only seen it used on stackoverflow.com, which is even a headache
for a user if you don’t habitually authenticate with one of their
OpenID providers whenever you surf.

I gazed over the specs and that’s exactly what happens.

Personally, I wouldn’t even bother with it. I think it’s a case of “good
ideal, bad implementation”.

Given that Backboard allows you to authenticate with OpenID:

and that embedit.in requires you to do so (the buttons for AOL, Yahoo!, and Google are merely shortcuts to the OpenID URLs for those providers):

you might suspect we have something to say about the whole matter. And you’d be right. The way we see it, OpenID fundamentally solves two very important problems while creating one new problem.

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When we launched embedit.in last month, the focus was on simplicity. No registration required, no seven-step process, nothing. Just upload a file and click “Embed It!”

Of course, the back end isn’t quite so simplistic: it stores your file, converts it to be viewable in our player, and generates the code for you to embed on your site. That last step presented us with an interesting challenge.

The initial version of the code used the OBJECT tag, complying with HTML standards. It was short, it was simple, and… it didn’t work in Internet Explorer 7.

<object width="466" height="400"
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    data="(url of flash file)">
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
</object>

Much has been written about the best way to embed Flash in webpages, and the state of the art is that the EMBED tag is bad, and the OBJECT tag is good, but requires different sets of attributes based on what browser is viewing the page.

That leaves us, therefore, with a need to have different markup depending on the browser, so libraries like SWFObject were born. Every browser gets the correct markup using the OBJECT tag, the HTML standard doesn’t feel violated, and another angel gets its wings.

One problem: it relies on JavaScript being available in the browser and a library being loaded. For an app like Backboard, that’s totally reasonable, but when the entire point is to let people copy a single line of code in to their site, it doesn’t work. So where does that leave us? That’s right, partying like it’s 1999.

<embed width="466" height="400"
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    src="(url of flash file)"
    allowFullScreen="true" />

Hey, look! It works in every browser, it’s just as functional, and the code is even shorter than before. Maybe it’s not standards-compliant, but it’s reliable, and isn’t that the point of standards in the first place?

Here at Increo, the fun just keeps on rolling. After the introduction of the new viewing experience two weeks ago and projects and recent activity last week, there’s more new stuff to tell you about today.

embedit.in is a new service that lets you embed files in your website. We realized that since we’ve built this great in-browser document-viewing technology for Backboard, we should make it available for more people to use. So we took that viewing technology and made a version you can embed right in your website.

It’s even simpler to use than Backboard: just upload your files and click the “Embed It!” button. After a quick login screen that lets you use accounts you already have (no registration required!), you’re instantly shown the document or documents along with the code to embed it in your own blog, profile page, or website. There’s no seven-step process, just two clicks and you’re done. What could be easier?

As an example, if I took these flyer PDFs for a marketing job opening and a software developer job opening and uploaded them to embedit.in, I’d get this:

You can view the document without having any additional plug-ins installed and without opening any software. And, of course, embedit.in works with any file formats that Backboard supports, including images, documents, and slide decks. You can embed multiple documents at once in a convenient tabbed interface. You can even embed websites in other websites! Try doing that with Scribd or SlideShare.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We think it’s pretty great.