Speaking of `<video>`, i came across a site today that used <embed src="foo.wav">. As long as video and audio formats are loosely specified, we could've used the existing syntax and existing browser infrastructure (you still can't disable HTML5 audio/video in Chrome[1] for e.g. data cap reasons)
The irony is that <embed> was never a standard (unlike <object>); if you believe the W3C fans then you must be evil to use it. But it works, and has always worked, better than any of the alternatives.
I hear with html5 they've given up and declared it part of the standard.
The "they" that "gave up" is a different group of people than the "they" who thought it was evil, by the way.
The current group working on the contemporary HTML living standard just describes reality, by and large, so there was never really any doubt that "embed" would be part of the standard when we started back in 2004.
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1. http://crbug.com/50132