Anne van Kesteren

Using OBJECT in the real world

Ian Hickson, creator of the Web Forms 2.0 working draft posted embedding flash without <embed>. His method seems to work better than the Flash Satay method introduced by A List Apart. On the other hand, his method uses more code, including an ugly hack. Fallback for non Internet Explorer browsers is more easier to create though and a little flash loading file isn't needed anymore as well.

Furthermore, a standards compliant method to add Quicktime movies to pages is available (including browser tests).

Comments

  1. At least the use of conditional comments (the aforementioned ugly hack) isn't is bad as using JavaScript to sniff for Internet Explorer.

    Since I used content negotiation to deliver text/html to Internet Explorer anyway, I have considered using that for handling Flash as well. At the moment, however, I think that using IE's conditional comments isn't going to do much harm.

    Posted by Simon Jessey at

  2. I think conditional comments are just brilliant, and at the moment they are the most standard compliant and non-hackish way to do a hack like this. I just love Ian for providing this workaround, because I've lost a lot of hair while scratching my head over the cursed embed tag.

    Posted by Asbjorn Ulsberg at

  3. hixie's not working on my NN4.7 (error text is showing)... Ross' does work, says it crashes NN4.8 but doesn't crash my 4.7, and i belive 4.8 is something like an after-mozilla release... so we could say Ross' is ok

    Posted by manuel at

  4. Netscape Navigator 4.anything is garbage. It has no tolerance for the <object> element, whether in 4.8 guise or not. It's use has dwindled to the point where it can be regarded as insignificant.

    By the way, Anne. You don't want us to use rel="external" in links anymore?

    Posted by Simon Jessey at

  5. You can check my valid flash example that complies to web standards XHTML.

    Tested with Mozilla, Explorer, Opera... Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.

    Posted by dusoft at

  6. I think his code is prety neat, and working better than the silly javascript that spits invalid html just to avoid the W3C from reporting errors... Than this is a way more serious atempt to solute the problem. Anyone any hints on making the bg transparent in OS-X Mac & Win Opera?

    Posted by errori.st at

  7. Slightly more interesting than my resolve last year when I created an <embed /> DTD.

    Posted by Robert Wellock at