embeding flash objects causes nesting error

Ok, so I have my own copy of SlideShowPro from Dominey Design, which I really love and I decide I wanted to update my blog and include some pictures in SSP. So I went through the whole thing and got it in place, but then in checking to see if it rendered out ok in Firefox I ran into a problem – WordPress is putting a </p> at the end of the first line of the object tag in the code. It looked like this:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="425" height="310" id="hammonwry" ></p>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="hammonwry.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="/photo_albums/hammonwry.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="425" height="310" name="hammonwry" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></object>

In case you’re like me and you missed it, it’s right before the first parameter is defined on it’s own. Super annoying.

It took me a good hour to get this, but once found, no biggie. I figured it was just a matter of not resetting the option for WP to close invalidly nested XHTML. But I looked, and that was not the case. Just for fun, I toggled, saved, toggled again and tried the page, but nope, not happening. So I hacked it.

Which I hate to do.

I had to add an opening paragraph tag to the end of the first line of the object tag. So the code now reads <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="425" height="310" id="hammonwry" ><p> in the input field, but if you check out the page, it’s even stranger. View the source this page and you’ll notice that my <p> has now mysteriously become <br /> as apparently in the WP math if you add <p> + </p> you get a line break. Who knew?

So, somewhere WP is doing some stuff that I’ve specifically asked it not to, or perhaps this is a slightly different bug, or perhaps the code that I’m using for this flash object is somehow wrong. Either way, it’s all odd to me, how was it for you?