embedding

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.

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As some of you know, I've recently taken over maintenance of Inline and Image Assist, and initiated the Wysiwyg project. That was not only caused by personal interest, but also to take the necessary steps to realize the long awaited Inline API. You might ask yourself, what those three modules have in common or to do with each other at all: They deal with user input, allow to embed complex contents into a content, and provide an interactive GUI for that. If you already had the chance to work with them, you already know that there is a rather hidden, non-obvious hard-dependency between them.

Although I'd really like to discuss both topics (Inline and Wysiwyg support) separately, the gained experience on these topics enforces us to discuss them concurrently. The following mockup hopefully explains why: (see attachment to view in full size)

In writing SWF Tools I attempted to follow some design patterns that would make the embedding aspect of it generic. The embedding logic is there, but it's surrounded by a lot of unreleted code. So with the benefit of hindsight, here is a run-through of an "Embed API". Much of this is simply cloned Forms API.