Recent loss of embedded QT movies on many page for IE7 using ActiveX object

Question

I have many pages that allow you to select from 4 video formats including QT .mov. An example is at http://www.cwdjr.net/video4/cancanL.php . The QT object uses ActiveX when on IE only(I use Windows conditional comments) and an ordinary object for most other browsers. Until sometime very recently all of these pages worked when you select the QT file. Now QT works on none of them. I suspected the problem might be due to a very recent Windows XP update which is a large one including .NET updates and other things(K8951847) X 86. I was able to restore to a day before this update, but this did not solve the problem. Of course some portions of some updates can not be removed be restoring to an earlier time, so the result does not prove the update was not at fault.
The involved pages are mostly written in php on the server, so you will not be able to see very much by viewing the source code. To make the problem more simple to view, I made a test page for QT only and with the ActiveX object only. Thus this test page can not be viewed on most browsers that do not support ActiveX. The test page is at http://www.cwdjr.info/broadbandMedia/formatsAX/qtmovtest2.php . Since I serve pages as valid xhtml 1.1 using the correct mime type application xhtml+xml, no IE browser can view the page, since no IE browser can support xhtml served properly. Thus I have a php include at the very top for header exchange between the browser and server. If this says the page does not support the mime type for xhtml, then php using regular expressions, etc is used to rewrite the page as html 4.01 strict for the outmoded browser. Thus don't be surprised if you find some pages in xhtml and others in html when you check properties.
The ActiveX object used for QT on the test page is below:
QT MOV
(CLICK ABOVE LINK IF NO PLAYER)
<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" width="400" height="295" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<param name="autoplay" value="true" />
<param name="controller" value="true" />
<param name="kioskmode" value="true" />
<param name="src" value="http://www.cwdjr.info/movie/cancan.mov" />
</object>
Once the page comes up on IE7, it is rather slow to respond. Then it gives:
"Web site wants to install the following ActiveX control: 'Quick Time' from 'Apple Inc'".
If you do try to install, nothing happens. In contrast to my regular pages, I added the code show above just before the start of the object. Clicking this on will bring up the QT video, but of course it is not embedded on the desired page. This may work as a temporary fix for IE. I likely can hide it from other browsers by enclosing it in Microsoft conditional comments.
I would be interested if anyone else has had such a problem recently or any ideas concerning this strange response on IE7. I am talking about viewing the page on the server. Since this is a php page it can be viewed locally only if you have a server installed on your computer and I do not. The pages with the first url example given above have operated well on IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari for Windows, Flock, K-Meleon, Google Chrome and SeaMonkey. There are a few players that have some issues with some of the formats, but this and the fact that some players may not be installed is the reason for offering the video in 4 formats. I sometimes offer high broadband versions as well as low broadband versions.
It seems I spend more time correcting IE issues than for all of the other mentioned browsers combined.

Answer 1

Thanks for the reference. I use nearly no JS anymore, since it often causes problems with true xhtml served properly even when you use external script files. Often one can use php script on the server and avoid these problems. When one serves as true xhtml using the correct mime type of application/xhtml+xml, the page is parsed with a very strict xml parser rather than a loose-as-a-goose html parser. (If one serves a page written in xhtml code as mime text/html, as is incorrectly done perhaps 99% of the time, you are using only html, not xhtml, and are fooling only yourself. The page is parsed as html instead of xhtml.) The xml parser has to be very strict to account for any possible xml content. Even a single, or even several, errors often will not prevent a html page from showing, but even a single error on an xhtml page served properly will often get an error report from the xml parser rather than a view of the page. One of the most laughable examples of misunderstanding of this issue is the home page of Microsoft. It claims to be xhtml. However it is served as text/html and thus would be better written in html 4.01 in the first place. Moreover, if you validate the page as xhtml at w3c, you find hundreds of xhtml errors. If Microsoft served their home page properly as application/xhtml+xml it of course would not work on any IE browser, at least through IE7, since none of these IE browsers can handle true xhtml. In addition the page likely would not show up on any browser if served as true xhtml until all of the hundreds of xml and other errors on the page were corrected. Instead, one likely would get a very long error report rather than a view of the page.
Back to JS, document.write will not work in properly served xhtml, because it easily could produce code with XML errors. For instance it might produce code that contains an unclosed tag, which is a major xml error that can cause an xml device to malfunction. The xml parser thus rightly finds document.write as an error and prevents viewing of the page. However one often can generate the same code as document.write would produce on a browser with php on the server. The finished code is what gets downloaded to the browser, so the xml parser can check everything in the finished code rather than quess what a JS document.write might produce. And don't think you can sweep document.write under the rug by using an external JS file. The very strict xml parser finds it.
Of course embed has never been a w3c tag, but rather is a bad hangover from the browser war era, a gift of Netscape. No page that includes embed can validate as w3c xhtml or xml of any flavor, at least through xhtml 1.1. However the page may work, despite the error, if server as text/html.
All I know is that something has happened recently that has caused my problem to surface. It likely has to do with some change in the XP OS or IE browser. I have tried viewing several pages written by others that use many types of code for .mov, and all of them I have viewed that use an ActiveX embed for the benefit of IE now have the problem I mentioned. If anyone else with XP and nearly all updates, including the very recent one I mentioned, and the most recent version of QT has had this problem, I could be more confident that the problem comes from an external source. If not, it is still possible the sudden change could be something concerning a specific issue that has developed in my computer.
Again, thanks for the JS reference. Some of this likely can translate into php so I can compare how the JS and php server script I am using relate.