Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The Satay-method and handling a missing SWF-plugin...

This might seem kind of trivial, but I've had a number of students, whom have asked me:

"The Satay-method doesn't code-wise take into account, if a client doesn't have the (necessary) SWF-plugin installed! What can you do about that?"

And they're right - even though Drew McLellan does actually mention a workaround for this in his excellent article about the Satay-method at:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/
and in his posted article at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/flash_satay.html

by just including a "sacrificial movie" at the front of a site which has the codebase attribute; something which I'm not all that keen on, TBH...

I mean, why make an extra swf-file and add some extra html-coding, when it can all be done in one go?


So IMO, the simple answer to that one, is to put the following code in-between the LAST "param"-tag and the </object>-tag:

No Flash-content?<br/>: >>
<a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi? >>
P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW"> >>
<img >> src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif" >>
alt="Get the latest Flash-plugin from adobe.com..." /></a>


NOTE: The ">>" in the code above denotes line-breaks...

So remember when pasting the code above into your (x)html-document that it has to be in one long string, to avoid unintended line-breaks etc. ...