The Lurker

More on politically-correct Flash embedding

A while ago Kevin mentioned in his blog the code he and Nev used to embed Flash objects in valid XHTML.

This article at A List Apart (a site most notable for its hideous colour scheme) describes basically the same thing and how that author arrived at it, noting additionally that when the object element's data attribute is used to specify the URL of the Flash object, Internet Explorer (in yet another effort to claim the "Netscape 4 of tomorrow" title) downloads the whole Flash file before displaying it, rather than allowing it to run as it streams in (as it does when using <param name="movie" value="blah.swf">). The article mentions a workaround (a trivial "container" flash object which simply loads the real content), which seems like a simple enough workaround, but why he uses a parameter in the container object's query string to supply the URL of the real content (thus ensuring the container has to be downloaded separately for each embedded object) rather than a parameter on the object tag is beyond me.

Related topics: Web Mindless Link Propagation