Comparing flash embedding techniques

The code

A closer look

Link

The code

<OBJECT width="425" height="350">
<PARAM name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EwEk62HViIA"></PARAM>
<PARAM name="wmode" value="transparent"></PARAM>
<EMBED src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EwEk62HViIA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

A closer look

Youtube movies internal features aren't supposed to be accesible

Link

The code

A closer look

Browser compatibility problems (during test)

Opera 7.5 on Windows didn't embed the flash element "FAIL (the browser should render some flash content, not this)."

Link

The code

<OBJECT data="http://youtube.com/v/mrW8ub2H3MY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350">
<PARAM name="movie" value="http://youtube.com/v/mrW8ub2H3MY">
</OBJECT>

A closer look

Browser compatibility problems (during test)

Opera 7.5 on Windows didn't embed the flash element, but I think it was because I did the test with a YouTube movie, where the flash elements only is linked by an ID-number and isn't a 'normal' file with .swf extension.
I used this technique earlier and there were no problems then. I'll review this again later.

This way of embedding made IE5.2 on Mac ignore the float: left; of the div containing the SWF. View screenshot.

Note

This embedding technique was usefull for me when I wanted to embed an flash element in a Plone-website (Plone is an open source content management system). The plone site used the Kupu editor to make the content management easier. But this plugin also "cleaned" the html code entered. The main problem was in the 'embed' element, so this method was a great way to work arround it.

For more information about this subject, please read my post about embedding flash elements in Plone.

Link

The code

Link UFO javascript file (ufo.js) to your html document

<script type="text/javascript"> var FO = { movie:"http://youtube.com/v/1zN9gtrF7xI", width:"425", height:"350", majorversion:"6", build:"0" }; UFO.create(FO, "UFOway"); </script>

<div id="UFOway"> Replacement text </div>

A closer look

Validation: UFO uses W3C DOM methods to insert the object element for all Gecko based browsers (e.g. Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape) and all other browsers that use both the Netscape plug-in API (e.g. Opera and Safari) and an XML MIME type.

UFO uses innerHTML to insert the object element for Internet Explorer

Browser compatibility problems (during test)

Internet Explorer 5.2 on Mac didn't embed the flash movie. "You need to upgrade your Flash Player"

Link

The code

Link SWFObject javascript file (swfobject.js) to your html document

<script type="text/javascript"> var so = new SWFObject("http://youtube.com/v/0EW4SRxLczk", "SWFObject-way", "425", "350", "7", "#ffffff"); so.write("flashcontent"); </script>

A closer look

Validation: Can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents when pages are sent as text/html, not application/xhtml+xml. So that makes SWFObject less W3C compliant then UFO.

Link