Inspired by this question, where the poster casually states as fact that <object> should be used instead of <img> to embed images in HTML documents.
I'm developing a web app at the moment, and, being a perfectionist, I try to make it all shiny and compliant with all the standards. As far as I know, the <img> tag is to be deprecated in the upcoming standards for xHTML, and as nowadays even IE is able to handle <object> properly, I wanted to use the <object> tag for all the images on my site
It became clear that the "upcoming standards" the poster was talking about was the abandoned XHTML2 spec, which didn't even formally deprecate <img> anyway. (Although there were apparently rumors to that effect.)
To the best of my knowledge, I've not seen anyone in the web development community advocating for the usage of the general-purpose <object> tag over the arguably more semantic and definitely more compatible <img> tag.
Is there a good reason to use <object> instead of <img>? Should <object> even be used at all in place of <img> – what might this break?