1 Untitled

The embedded Quicktime for IE-only trick supposedly shows nothing in non-IE browsers. This is not entirely correct since it does work in Opera 7.54, Safari 2.0.3 and OmniWeb 5.1.1 (on Mac OS 10.4.6). Funny thing is that IE 5.2 (Mac) does not work. The full solution indeed works as advertised, even in IE5.2-Mac.

Great article btw—thanks.

posted at 08:30 am on July 11, 2006 by Hendrik Jan Veenstra

2 Untitled

Very useful article, thanks. I’m implementing this into my website now. It’s worth noting that the control toolbar for Windows Media Player is included in the ‘height’ variable (intensely irritating as it may be). For IE6 and Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP this is an extra 45 pixels, but I don’t know if this is the same across all browsers and operating systems.

posted at 08:42 am on July 11, 2006 by Ian Ferguson

3 ASP

Funnily enough, my windows server refuses to render the code. It gives an ASP error, which seems strange as it has no business examining HTML!

Active Server Pages, ASP 0139 (0×80004005) An object tag cannot be placed inside another object tag.

posted at 09:13 am on July 11, 2006 by Ian Ferguson

4 Why?

Why can’t we focus on getting the ubiquitous <embed> tag incorporated into the XHTML specification? Look how simple and elegant this is:

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/I4-5rqlhePQ” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425” height=”350”></embed>

posted at 12:22 pm on July 11, 2006 by Jake Brown

5 Useful!

Thanks for this useful article from one of the Web’s most important women writers.

posted at 01:19 pm on July 11, 2006 by Virginia DeBolt

6 Definitely Interesting - But there's a better way.

Check out www.HappinessU.org

They take a rather simple approach to this entire problem that not only makes sense, but requires a heck of a lot less code than any of the other workarounds I’ve seen out there.

If you’re not a real programmer and just want to fix this, they even have a little tool for the commoner that lets you drop your old embed code in and it creates all the code you need.

posted at 01:45 pm on July 11, 2006 by dan rulz

7 JavaScript

To JavaScript, or not to JavaScript. For me, there are no alternative options but to always use JavaScript when embedding rich media content.

As we all know, the latest versions of IE 6 (with the recent security update) and IE 7 beta permanently changed the behavior of assets embedded using ActiveX. This is especially detrimental to Flash, where users must click an annoying dialog box button to activate the movie before it can load/playback. While this is (for now) and IE only issue, it may as well affect all browsers because of IE’s ubiquity.

With that, the easiest way to get around IE is to embed your Flash movies using JavaScript, with SWFObject (http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/) the best one out there (IMO). It requires only a few lines of code, provides Flash Player version detection, and allows you to easily offer alternate content to those without the Flash Player (or JavaScript enabled for that matter).

You can simply use a series of document.write calls to do the same thing, and avoid the page weight hit of embedding a medium sized external JS file, if page weight is a concern. But that’s prone to human error, and can be a real pain in the arse to maintain.

My points are mostly related to the complexities of embedding Flash content and not necessarily QT or Windows, but after years of tinkering with alternate ways for embedding Flash content and detecting player versions I’ve yet to find a better solution than using JavaScript.

posted at 02:43 pm on July 11, 2006 by Todd Dominey

8 Amazing!

Amazing! I spent several hours today trying to bust this nut. I almost gave up in the end. Then “ta-da”, out of the blue (without searching) the answer turns up.

Many thanks! – Loved the crackers.

posted at 03:42 pm on July 11, 2006 by Ricky Cox

9 Added to list of resources

I added this article to my page that documents every known method of using embed and object with valid code:

Standards-compliant Web pages with captioning

Man, this Textile syntax is weird.

posted at 04:44 pm on July 11, 2006 by Joe Clark

10 0's & 1's for booleans

autostart=”false” only works in IE, if you use 0’s and 1’s for the boolean switches it works in Firefox, and IE have not tested others.

posted at 05:28 pm on July 11, 2006 by Scott Schecter