Journal Entries

Feb 21, 2007

Sweat the details.

Argh.

After finding out about Microsoft’s modifications to ActiveX that created a user-expectation defying halo around Flash content, I tried implementing Adobe’s fix on this site. And I’m not going to lie, I struggled with the details.

It introduces four new failure points for embedding SWF files within HTML; an external javascript file, two script tags in the header of the HTML, and one javascript function within the body of the HTML. The one that frustrated me the most is the javascript function in the body. It’s relatively simple. It looks for browser javascript support and, upon finding it, embeds and activates the SWF. The killer is in the lines:

’src’, ‘myMovieName’,
‘movie’, ‘myMovieName’ ,

These lines correspond to these lines in the original method to embed a SWF:

<embed src=”myMoveName.swf” …
<param name=”movie” value=”myMovieName.swf” />

Notice the change? I didn’t either, but look closely. In the javascript function, the embedded SWF cannot have the extension ‘.swf’ but in the original method the extension ‘.swf’ must be present. How many designers updating pages outside of Dreamweaver were tripped up by that little coding eccentricity? I know I’m not the only one with my hand up.

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