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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Standards compliant Flash

And here it is: Flash Satay—Embedding Flash while Supporting Standards. It involves jumping througg a few hoops but the end result is a nice chunk of standards compliant code that can be used to embed flash movies without invalidating the markup of a page. The article also includes a nice example of how to use the object tag to serve up alternative content—by nesting an image (or other HTML) inside the tag browsers that do not support content with a mime-type of application/x-shockwave-flash will have something to display in place of the Flash file.

Posted 9th November 2002 at 8:45 pm

This is Standards compliant Flash by Simon Willison, posted on 9th November 2002.

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7 comments

  1. What. A. Load. Of. Crap.

    Zeldman: "This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML. They said it couldn't be done. Now it can be. Have your Flash and standards, too."

    Funny how I embeded a movie a few months ago using valid XHTML Strict then! I'm sorry but this doesn't reveal anything really new (apart from the streaming whatever, but I'm not a Flash developer).

    Maybe I'll write a shock article detailing a shock new XHTML way to link between pages! Oh, wait, that's <a>.

    Tom Gilder - 9th November 2002 21:52 - #

  2. I dunno - the technique may not be revolutionary (although I wouldn't have had a clue how to do it) but the article is right in saying that most standards-aware developers think embedding Flash in a standards compliant page isn't possible. At least now there's a good point of reference for developers who want to embed flash without breaking validation.

    Simon Willison - 9th November 2002 22:23 - #

  3. I don't have a problem with the article. I accept most developers don't understand how to embed Flash using valid HTML. Having something to point people at is handy, yes. But Zeldman is *massivly* over-hyping this article, making out that it's the best thing since sliced bread. I really wish Zeldman had a comments system somtimes :)

    Tom Gilder - 10th November 2002 03:19 - #

  4. Tom: Could you provide an example of the Flash you say you used that validated in XHTML strict?

    Mike - 24th July 2003 21:47 - #

  5. I agree with above "Could you provide an example of the Flash you say you used that validated in XHTML strict?" thanks

    shaggy - 6th October 2003 16:52 - #

  6. I have developed a improved container that re-enables most of the options that we lose through the satay method like quality, showmenu and align and much more...

    The improved container is a flash file included in my textpattern version of the satay method so just download it and extract it from there.. look at the source to see how it is done... regards max

    Find the improved Satay method at my site

    Max Ziebell - 19th May 2004 23:03 - #

  7. Anyone else have problems getting a getURL to work in a Flash movie when the mime type is set to application/x-shockwave-flash?

    Henry Saucemeister - 29th April 2006 10:25 - #

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