Journal Entries

Feb 14, 2007

Click To Activate And Use This Control

Wow. This sucks rocks.

In an effort to comply with patent litigation, Microsoft has modified ActiveX to require that a user click within the bounding box of embedded content to interact with it. The result is that Flash SWFs, as well as java applets, embedded within HTML appear to have a chunky border when the user rolls over the content. While the message “Click To Activate And Use This Control” appears in one of those yellow “cryptic messages of mystery”, this whole situation is a disaster for usability. Users have become rather sophisticated at identifying interactive content before their mouse does. A highlighted area is a clickable area that changes the state of the page. This Microsoft modification violates that expectation as when the user clicks the highlighted area, nothing happens. From a surfer’s point of view, the page is broken and leads to assumptions about the seriousness of the people behind the page. (I’m not sure if this says more for the skill of browsers or a lack of creativity from designers. That’s a loaded topic for a later date, no doubt.)

Adobe has created a fix in the form of an extension. It may be downloaded here. I saw a mumbling on FlashCoders that this fix could break flash to javascript communication. That does not surprise me. As Flash gets more complex, fundamental changes in specifications like Microsoft’s send us all back 5 years when it was commonplace to check for five to ten browsers, in multiple versions, that execute seventeen versions of the same code. If you are not working towards standards compliance, then consider every “Click To Activate And Use This Control” a personal censure from me.

Huh. In re-reading this, I guess I am now one of those people.

Update: Apparently I am really late to the party. In my defense, I am a full-time Firefox user and a recreational Safari user. Internet Explorer has always been a bit of a pariah on my dock.

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