Starting off with a tip vs. a question

I found this site this evening while doing a google search to solve a Windows Server 2003 problem. VERY nice forum! I run one very similar in structure, but using CGI vs. PHP.

Anyway, this post isn't in the Flash section just for you to listen to me ramble about what I like about this place.

The other day, while doing site revisions for a client, I ran into a little snag with the <embed> tag in the code for Flash. I had been creating some Ad banners for another client using CoffeCup Firestarter and my client wanted some, too. Normally no problem, but in the process of revisions, I was also upgrading the 2 year old HTML 4.0 code to XHTML.

I try whenever possible to make sure the code validates to HTML/XHTML/CSS standards via validator.w3.org. Guess, what? The standard code to embed Flash was not valid XHTML as the <embed> tag is deprecated. The dilemna was that if I removed the <embed> tag, the Flash wouldn't display in Netscape 4.x browsers. Had to come up with a solution. I tried <iframe> which was valid in XHTML and it worked OK in virtually everything I tested except NS 4.x

It took a couple days but finally a friend offered a link that provided the solution. It's a good one, and rather than starting out my posting here with a question, I just thought I'd share what I found. Here's the tutorial that describes how to add valid XHTML code for Flash to display in virtually everything (The only browser I couldn't get it to work in was Opera 5.2). (Also note the great tip near the end of the tute regarding loading in MSIE browsers)

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/flashsatay/

Enjoy!

welcome to ozzu!

that's an excellent, excellent tip! Thanks a lot for posting that.
Hope to see you stick around...

As I said, I LIKE what y'all have done here, very much. Thanks for the kind welcome.

I agree, that is an extremely good tip. I wasn't even aware you could make Flash run without that embed tag. Now I know you can

Surprised me, too. I've probably been copy and pasting the same code everyone else has by rote for years. It never occurred to me to think about why the embed tag was included in the object element. I agree with you guys. It IS an Excellent tip. I knew there had to be a way. I'm sure others have (or will) run into the issue sooner or later.

Glad you guys can benefit from it.

After using this code based on the tute, I discovered one major flaw. It did not work at all in MSIE 5.0 browsers. Had to do something about that as close to 50% of my client's visitors use that browser version.

The solution was to add back in the classid and codebase:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="banner1.swf" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com
/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0"
width="480" height="60">
<param name="movie" value="banner1.swf" />
</object>

Problem: Now it does not display in NS 4.x, NS 6, Mozilla 1.3b or Opera 5.2. As that is less than (5% of the visitors {and most of those were me testing things} - my client had no problems with this solution)

If anyone can figure out a way to get the antiquated NS / Mozilla stuff to display this, I'd be happy to know about it.

Hmm that bites then. I wonder why IE 5 needs the classid attribute and the other IE's do not.

I wondered that myself. *shrug -- old standards, I guess. Who knows. Point is, I have 95% of the viewers covered now and since my client agrees to that, I'm not wasting anymore time on it. One of these days I'll sit down and figure it out, but for now, I'm on my time not his....*lol

What was really odd was that all the other Netscape (6, Mozilla 1.3, Phoenix, etc...displayed the Flash without the classID, but when I added it back to get MSIE 5 to display, the Mozilla-based stuff stopped displaying it) *shrug -- my client's happy - I'm happy!