Discuss: Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards

by Drew McLellan

11 Mac browsers and Object...

Jonathan said that all Mac browsers used only the Embed tag to access plugins. From what I can tell, that’s not true. Mozilla and Chimera seem to work just fine with this technique; I will assume Netscape does as well. IE5/Mac works with it, as do iCab and Opera.

NS4 and OmniWeb 4.x don’t seem to work with the Object tag. Frankly, it’s their loss.

posted at 02:15 pm on November 9, 2002 by Millennium

12 Browser support

I’ve re-tested and with a version of the player compatible with the movie in this article, and I see it working in both IE 5.0 and NS 4.
I’d be interested to hear if you have the same problem in these browsers once you’ve updated your Flash Player.
(remember there a techniques outside the scope of this article for detecting what version of the player is being used).

posted at 02:27 pm on November 9, 2002 by Drew McLellan

13 Re: Mac browsers and Object

What I meant is that the method used by almost everybody (the “Cooked Twice Method” aka the Macromedia Code) made the <object> tag useless in Mac browsers – all of them relied on the <embed> to display the plugin. Believe me, I had a lot of problem with a client updating pages I’ve done in FrontPage (brrrr…). It made the Flash on the page disappear in every Mac browser, because it was always removing the <embed> tag (IE/Windows doesn’t need them).

Obviously, the article proved that it is possible to use the <object> tag with Mac browsers, something I thought was not possible before.

posted at 02:39 pm on November 9, 2002 by Jonathan

14 Not working - More...

I find the same result as Manuel Razzari with IE5.5/Win – see a screenshot at [img]http://www.december14.net/graphics/posts/flashsatay.gif[/img]

Interestingly, though the box looks like a TEXTAREA, I found you can’t actually type in it. Also, note that the page title appears as “about:blank” rather than “A List Apart: Flash Satay” as given by the TITLE tags. Maybe these give a clue to some bright spark as to what’s going on.

posted at 03:48 pm on November 9, 2002 by Keith Bell

15 Re: IE 5.5

I have the Flash working in IE 5.5 here, so it’s not a direct 5.5 issue.
Do you get the same results once you’ve updated your Flash Player? I have to stress that the article includes no player version checking – this alone is the subject of another article.
Thanks for the feedback.

posted at 03:57 pm on November 9, 2002 by Drew McLellan

16 saved!

You have saved me! Having written strict compliant XHTML/CSS for the last 1.5 years I can now have 100% compliant Flash movies in my content. Excellent. Leave it to Alistapart!

posted at 04:08 pm on November 9, 2002 by dave rau

17 QuickTime movies

I did a quick test of a QuickTime Movie object, with pretty good results on a Mac OS X, using the following code:

Error text </object>

Worked fine on Chimera 0.6, Mozilla 1.1, Opera 6b2 and iCab 2.8.2.
MSIE 5.1.1 worked but showed no movie controller.
OmniWeb 4.1.1 displayed the nested content.

posted at 04:38 pm on November 9, 2002 by Michael Zajac

18 Nested Objects

For compatibility, why not nest two <object> tags?

The outer one uses the traditional method for MSIE/win, and the inner one for Netscape and Mac browsers.

This is not quite as trim on the code, but should still validate, work almost everywhere and allows nested fallback html.

[rats, I shouldn’t have typet “<” on my previous post. Can someone fix that?]

posted at 04:42 pm on November 9, 2002 by Michael Zajac

19 Nested objects: Nope

Michael—nice thought, but IE/Win will render all nested object tags, not just the first one.

I know this because I’ve been working on a slightly different method of embedding cross-browser compatible plug-ins using <object>, and making use of some new features being added to Mozilla.

In the process, I came up with a way to nest object tags without getting the double, tripple, etc. rendering in IE/Win, while still supporting automatic downloading of plugins—for both IE and Mozilla. I’m not quite done testing across browsers and platforms, otherwise I’d share the details.

There’s probably a whole other article there, if apartness is interested.

posted at 05:01 pm on November 9, 2002 by Peter K. Sheerin