I was initially very excited to see that an article had been posted on DevNet on the topic of Flash Player detection and how best to embed SWF files into HTML pages. The mechanism by which you embed a SWF file into your HTML page plays a primary role in determining the user experience of your Flash sites, especially for users without the Flash Player or with earlier versions of the Flash Player. Unfortunately, the Adobe article fails to mention the most important single solution in this field: SWFObject.
The Incomplete: Adobe’s “Best Practices for Flash Player Detection” article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
I'd recommend that you refer to the SWFObject page as your own private Best Practices for Flash Player Detection article. Or, if you'd rather, there is an Adobe DevNet article on SWFObject with the same content that you can refer to.
The Incomplete: Adobe’s “Best Practices for Flash Player Detection” article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
UFO is another good alternative for embedding Flash movies into HTML pages: http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/
I’ll second UFO, though I continue to be somewhat ignorant of exactly what the differences between the two are. I’ll keep using UFO until somebody convinces me otherwise :)
That’s strange – that best practices article was written months ago when Flash 8 was still in beta (and hardly anyone knew about FlashObject back then). Maybe they made some edits to it and that made it pop back up on the product notifier?
“Plugin Framework” detects and embeds Quicktime, Flash, Windows Media, Acrobat, Java, etc…
They do have a stripped down version just for flash. I think this is by far the most thorough flash embedding script.
http://www.knallgrau.at/code/plugin_js/
Thanks for the tips, guys. Hadn’t seen Plugin Framework before. Having looked at it, I still prefer the simplicity and elegance of SWFObject.
Im not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but if you move the javascript code out of the body tag and into a window.onload command, there is a flicker of the alt content before the Flash gets drawn. Any ideas?