Discuss: Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards

by Drew McLellan

231 Showing the alternate content

to users who don’t have the flash-plugin is the only thing I need. I don’t want to force people to upgrade anything. I have used a code like this:

</object>

(which I have edited from the satay-method, thanks a lot)It works in most cases, but it doesn’t know which version of Flash the user has. If user has version 5 and the banner is made in Flash MX only white space will be shown.

Is there a way to show the gif-version if the flash-banner can not be shown (without using any javascript-vbscript-crap)?

posted at 03:10 am on November 14, 2003 by Jerky

232 Testing 'Satay' method online/offline

I’ve been trying out the Satay method – works really well in IE6 (pc).

One thing I’ve found is that if you disable Active X controls and test offline the flash movie still delivers – in order to guage whether satay method worked I had to upload the file and test online.

posted at 12:57 pm on November 25, 2003 by Chris Najman

233 Opera 7

For some reason, Opera browser does not cache the nested .swf-file. Maybe it has to do with the url: load.swf?open=movie.swf
? Caching works fine if the inside-movie is loaded alone.

Nice “hack” though. MacroMedia should really consider using valid HTML/XHTML.

posted at 09:27 am on November 27, 2003 by Morten

234 Percent bug in Netscape and Firebird

There is currently a percent bug problem in Netscape 7 and Firebird when trying to use the Satay method. Dylan from Foliomedia.com and myself have been working together on alternative solutions to make the Satay method work in as many browsers as possible, and in our testing we discovered a percent bug that displays a blank Flash object in the following browsers thus far: Netscape 7.0, 7.02, 7.1 and Firebird 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.7. The issue specifically appears when a percent is used in the height= attribute. A percent can be used in the width= but not in the height=. Also the bug seems to be closely tied the exclamation character in the XHTML DOCTYPE. For instance, if you delete the exclamation before the DOCTYPE html PUBLIC">DOCTYPE then suddenly the 100% in the height will work. You can also add an additional exclamation (<

html PUBLIC) and the height=“100%” will suddenly work and show the Flash object. For the moment, here’s an alternative to getting around the NetFire percent problem:

[removed]
//<![CDATA[
var ht = (screen.height)-158; ///Netscape 7 and Firebird percent fix.
[removed](’<object type=“application/x-shockwave-flash”
data=“flashmovie.swf” width=“100%” height=”’ht‘”>’)
[removed](’
</object>’)
//]]>
[removed]

This percent bug has been reported to Bugzilla and Netscape.

posted at 03:33 pm on December 2, 2003 by RazorX

235 Almost, but...

That was a great bit of sleuthing, but I really think that in using flash we still have no choice but to be seated between two chairs. I really like your (w3c compliant) method of providing alternate content but unfortunately it won’t work with IE 5.2 for Mac, it tries to display BOTH the swf and the img and/or text. No matter, even w3c hasn’t been able to provide a plausible alternative to embedded flash. You can see what I had to do on my site – I hope to be able to ‘lighten’ it soon.

Thanks for your work, cheers!

posted at 04:51 am on December 4, 2003 by Josefu

236 and what about ?

what about take your final

</object>

and add a simple

codebase=“http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”

wouldn’t any browser, if detect absence of type mentionned, open the codebase ?
and if not, simply put instead of a noflash.gif a textlink toward the codebase url upper ?

cause, you know, if there’s a way to respect w3c standards for using flash while keeping auto-updater fonctionnality, i’d be the very first to enjoy using it ;)

thx for you article anyway
coming back to read news
>nykk da freak

posted at 08:29 am on December 12, 2003 by beatnykk

237 The best way

I think the best way is to use default W3C standards without tricks like ‘data=“c.swf?path=movie.swf”’.

To prevent problems for some non standard compliant browsers you could use browserdetection. I think it’s not a problem to use non-W3C-validated code there.

posted at 08:40 am on December 13, 2003 by Paul van der Vlis

238 Re: Percent bug in Netscape and Firebird

“There is currently a percent bug problem in Netscape 7 and Firebird when trying to use the Satay method. Dylan from Foliomedia.com and myself have been working together on alternative solutions to make the Satay method work in as many browsers as possible, and in our testing we discovered a percent bug that displays a blank Flash object in the following browsers thus far: Netscape 7.0, 7.02, 7.1 and Firebird 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.7.”

Uhm, that’s not a bug.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#the-height-property
“The percentage is calculated with respect to the height of the generated box’s containing block.”
An empty body has a height of 0.
Now you could argue that this is replaced content and it has intrinsic height, however since a plugin displays the content, and not the browser – how do you expect the browser to figure out the content size?
However I can safely assume that what is wanted it 100% window height. One possible correct way to do this is with a style sheet:

BODY {margin: 0px; padding: 0px}
OBJECT {position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px}

Or place the object in a div container.

posted at 03:05 pm on December 15, 2003 by Ric Gates

239 Mozilla, flash and relative sizes

Using this codebase has anyone any idea how to make the movie size relative and still work in mozilla?

posted at 04:30 am on December 18, 2003 by Dan T

240 Re: Mozilla, flash and relative sizes

In order to make relative size work the way you want, you need to understand height in HTML.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-height-IMG

Height is not defined by the viewport (window) size, but by content or absolute position.

posted at 04:39 pm on December 23, 2003 by Ric Gates