Microsoft announced this week that they were going to stop purposefully breaking Internet Explorer's activex controls, rolling back the "click to activate" activex message that has been wasting the time and annoying the hell out of web developers for the past two years. According to the MSDN blog that announced the change this change won't require any actions on the part of developers:
It’s important (and cool) to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages. We are simply reverting to the old behavior. Once Internet Explorer is updated, all pages that currently require “click to activate” will no longer require the control to be activated. They’ll just work.
But, what about all of those people (myself included) who had to use all sorts of hacks and javascript embedding methods to work around this idiotic IE "quirk"? Also, are there any modules that include hacks to remove this error? If so they may need to get updated to reflect the change.
Anyway, at the very least future development that includes video and other embedded media should become a bit less of a pain.
Comments
SWF Object as standard?
As far as I can tell, the folks behind SWFObject (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/wiki/SWFObject_2_0_documentation) are really pushing it to be the standard for how you embed swf content in the page. Combined with jQuery's $(document).ready(.... it makes sense to me to continue in this direction- it helps keep the flash from messing with the actual page and can overcome some limitations in page rendering (I've noticed that the swf can mess up other things on the page depending on load order).
There are number of drupal projects that implement swfobject- swfobject_api, asset, swftools, and a few others. I wrote swfobject api to serve as a library- it probably needs some love, but it'd be great if we moved toward a single "drupal way" of dealing with this issue :)
http://24b6.net
swfobject isn't the only
swfobject isn't the only option, I've recently been using the flash embed script that comes with flowplayer. It works great as a jQuery plugin but also happens to work even without jQuery: http://flowplayer.org/tools/flash-embed.html
maybe the javascript won't be needed in the future but I may keep using it as it makes it easier to manage the user experience.. for example they need to upgrade flash, you want to load json playlists, etc.
... game in town
Yeah, you're right- there are other ways to solve the issue. I personally like swfobject as it makes a nice way to add objects but it is a bit of an overhead. What aspects of the flash embed script that your using do you like? It'd be interesting to have a compare and contrast.
http://24b6.net
I started using it because I
I started using it because I had some problems with a combination of jquery and swfobject, and multiple flash instances loading on a page. On certain browsers some of the flash instances didn't show up. The jQuery-based flashembed plugin solved whatever that issue was. flashembed.min.js is half the size of swfobject.js, it does everything I need (JSON configuration etc.) and is easy to use --
$("#example").flashembed({src:'example.swf'});