Here, temporarily, is my test of my own would-be improvement of a page supplied to me by a company.

The page has various oddities and failings. Please don't tell me about them; I already know. I also have a limited number of hours in the week in which I can fix them, and anyway the entire site may well be replaced within months. Instead, I'd like to ask about specific points.

If you have Flash, you should see an imagemap constructed in Flash near the top of the page.

If you don't have Flash, you should instead a list of links in its place. For the next few hours, the list of links is unfortunately in grey on white (because I wrote id="destlist" where I should have written class="destlist"). Also, you'll still be asked to click on a star, despite your inability to see any stars.

At the foot of the page, you'll see another set of links, added because I feared that some real-world browser somewhere might be unable to render plain HTML within OBJECT. (By "real-world", I exclude Amaya.) Does such a browser exist, or can I safely delete this extra set of links?

If you look at the source of the page, you'll see that I've just commented out the code I received. There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo (classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000", etc) in the OBJECT tag, which embeds the EMBED tag. I'm used to seeing this stuff, even if I only hazily understand what it's supposed to do. What puzzles me is that it's all in NOSCRIPT, immediately following a Javascript that looks as if it does much the same thing. What was the point of the Javascript, and does my radical simplification (no Javascript, no EMBED) risk losing anything?

It all has to do with the javascript workaround for the EOLAS lawsuit against microsoft.
They originally won a judgment (or looked like they were going to) that caused microsoft to release some versions of IE that would not run Active X controls without first displaying a big bad warning of some kind.
So the workaround that Microsoft (the vendor), Apple, and Adobe (the two largest plug-in manufacturers that used Active X controls in the vendor's browser) used was to use javascript to render the object tags on the fly. You'd have to ask a lawyer why this was okay.
The end result is that the current state of the art is to use the javascript tag with a noscript version of the same tags for those who don't have javascript enabled.

You can get better explanations of the whole thing on Adobe or Apple's websites if you search for embedding recommendations.

Do you know if the JS is still needed, jimlongo? Isn't it only older IE6 on XP that aren't kept updated that are affected? Truth be told, I've never seen the flashblock myself.

I'm not sure what version(s) of IE are affected, but I assume (regardless of webstats) that some people don't upgrade very often . . . can you relate to that

I just know that 2K was never affected. When I upgraded (?) to XP I eagerly awaited to see it but never did. Has it ever been an issue on Vista?

Thank you both for your input.

I hope I'm right in inferring that MSIE 5.5 (etc.), with or without Flash, would render one or other of the Flash image or the text.

Hmm, what about somebody running an old version of Flash? If a version of Flash is too old to show something newer, does it bow out gracefully, or does it need the attribute explicitly telling it that version such-and-such is required?

(My own opinion of most uses of Flash would upset the nannyware here, so I'll leave it unsaid.)

i can only tell you it didn't affect Windows 2.1, anything after that would be purely hearsay.

Usually javascript is used to detect the Flash version. It's also common to use both ActiveX and javascript in MSIE to test for Flash version support, typically with confusing error messages as the result if you've partially disabled ActiveX.


AFAIK it just becomes buggy.

More reading: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles..._detection.html

I can't remember seeing anything in IE6/XP. I almost never use IE7/Vista.

This seems to be about the same thing, but I just took a quick glance: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/

It was IE6 on XP it started with. I was on IE6/2K at the time. Updates must have revoked it. That's why I wonder if there's any real need for the JS workaround now. I mean, it's Flash. Some people won't see it no matter what. Does the small fraction that runs an unpatched IE6 on XP really matter to anyone?

I don't know the answer pandy, but people who know more than I are still recommending it.

What a pain in the posterior.

Perhaps I'll just create an imagemap (I mean, with HTML MAP). For starters, I'll need a small, simplified, tastefully colored public-domain map of the world, centred on Tokyo rather than Greenwich. Oh but then I suppose it would only have bog-standard "tooltips", for whose appearance one would have to plonk one's cursor on a star and wait.