1 Untitled

“In search of the solution, Geoff Stearns and I have teamed up. Instead of rewriting UFO and SWFObject, we are working on a single new, standards compliant and completely unobtrusive solution that will eventually replace both libraries.”

Hell yeah!

posted at 06:26 am on February 06, 2007 by Cory Duncan

2 Curiously awaiting SWFFix

As I read through this article, I felt myself getting more and more discouraged – until I read this:

“In search of the solution, Geoff Stearns and I have teamed up. Instead of rewriting UFO and SWFObject, we are working on a single new, standards compliant and completely unobtrusive solution that will eventually replace both libraries.”

Hell yeah!

posted at 06:28 am on February 06, 2007 by Cory Duncan

3 Great news

Teaming up with Geoff sounds like a cunning plan! Are we able to register for email updates on SwfFix at all?

posted at 09:12 am on February 06, 2007 by Cola Richmond

4 Email Updates

Cola: No email updates right now, but there’s a dev blog at http://www.swffix.org/ that has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.

posted at 02:33 pm on February 06, 2007 by Geoff Stearns

5 Great article, nice progress

I’m quite glad to read several things in this article. First off, thanks for being willing to self-criticize. Too many people in this business feel that what they’ve done is the be-all, end-all solution. Your ability to look at what you’ve done and say “nope, its not quite good enough” is appreciated.

Moreover, I’m glad to see you guys teaming up to improve the situation. I’ve been using UFO for a while now and I’ve always justified the lack of support for people with Javascript turned off by saying that in (what I imagine) would be nearly all cases where Javascript was not enabled, flash would not be enabled either. Sadly, I’ve done no real research to see if that view holds water.

Looking forward to seeing this SWFFix project gain traction within the community. Thanks for (what I believe maybe the first) good, concise explanation of what is wrong with flash, object, and embed.

posted at 03:48 pm on February 06, 2007 by Brian Crescimanno

6 jQuery Flash Plugin

Perhaps many ALA readers are unfamiliar with jQuery (check it out at http://jquery.com). For those who are, there is a plugin by Luke Lutman (http://jquery.lukelutman.com/plugins/flash/) that seems to address most of the issues raised in this article. I would love to hear Bobby’s impression of it.

posted at 04:44 pm on February 06, 2007 by Tim Gossett

7 Untitled

Thanks for the article Bobby, SWFFix sounds like it will be a great product.

One challenge I have with embedding flash is when the flash has some transparency and has to overlay on top of the HTML. When the flash movie is covering HTML in firefox, I can’t interact with the HTML at all. This is when setting the wmode parameter to “transparent”. Are you familiar with any fixes to this issue at all? Apologies if its outside the scope of this article.

Thanks, Dave

posted at 05:05 pm on February 06, 2007 by David Marr

8 Similar solution

I’ve already found a similar solution at http://www.dgx.cz/trine/item/how-to-correctly-insert-a-flash-into-xhtml

I used it for a while and it seems to work correctly in several browser and OS

posted at 05:13 pm on February 06, 2007 by Fabrizio Calderan

9 My impression of the jQuery Flash plugin

Tim: I think that the jQuery Flash plugin can be a good solution when you are already using the jQuery library. In all other cases you would add a lot of unnecessary overhead.

Like the author writes in the script’s credits, it is pretty much inspired by SWFObject and UFO, which means it contains a lot of the same functionality, however it also shares the same degradation problems.

When it comes to standards compliancy, it uses the embed element only.

posted at 07:06 pm on February 06, 2007 by Bobby van der Sluis

10 Flash Microformat

Tim: Thanks for the plug :-)

Bobby: You’re spot on about the jquery flash plugin. I decided to go for browser support and (much) simpler code over standards compliance by using embed. That said, it would be quite simple to swap out the method that generates the embed for a (mostly) standards compliant one, if one were so inclined.

One other con to UFO, SWFObject, jQuery.flash, etc. is that the swf and parameters are usually defined in the javascript—mixing behavior and content—rather than in the markup where they belong.

I think that a flash microformat (to define the swf, height, width, alternate content, etc.), paired with a library like jQuery (using it’s dom selection and manipulation to find and parse the microformat) and UFO/SWFObject/jQuery.flash (for version checking and generating markup) has some really interesting possibilities (sorry for the hasty example markup).

posted at 08:24 pm on February 06, 2007 by Luke Lutman