moving to XHTML?
i think i may try to convert the entire site to XHTML 1.0 transitional. currently it's HTML 4.01 transitional… largely because of how much flash i use, and also partly because of Ian Hickson's "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful". on the other hand, despite being basically HTML 4, i doubt many (any?) pages validate correctly (especially now since i just added />'s to the img tags in the common header file so that this tech blog will be XHTML 1.0 complaint 
)
so why bother to convert to XHTML? mainly for purposes of self-education, and because XHTML just "feels" tidier, since it's XML, and that appeals to the side of me that likes coding elegance. i think Hickson makes some excellent points, and perhaps serving XHTML as text/html is indeed very broken, but eh, my pages are broken now anyway, so…
but back to embedding flash in XHTML. i'd looked at flash satay, which looks very clean, but having to have a separate container "loading" SWF so that flash movies will stream in IE seemed like too much of a burden to manage.
then i came across deconcept › Proper Flash embedding: FlashObject Best Practices, which is a javascript-based approach to writing in the appropriate flash tags. i haven't tried it yet, but it looks neat, and most of my site requires javascript anyway, so that's not a new burden for my visitors.
i will have to poke around with it and see how it well it works with the cyber pets
May 14th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
In XHTML, using an object tag with a param name of movie and value of the filename should work (like in http://www.frozen-o.com/development/pong.php). I'd paste in the markup, but I can never remember if Wordpress htmlentities() comments…
At any rate, last I checked, it worked in the major browsers and it validates as XHTML 1.1 compliant.
May 14th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
there's an issue with that and IE, according to the flash satay article: IE won't show anything until the movie is completely loaded (rather than playing as soon as data starts arriving).
May 15th, 2005 at 7:01 am
Have you given it a shot? We have two iMacs and a Powerbook over here. so I can't readily test thing out…but I seem to remember testing it out in IE via Virtual PC at least and it semed happy.
May 15th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
not yet… i'll try it out. it certainly would be very clean that way!
May 16th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
ok. i tried it. the flash satay article is correct– on IE/windows, the movie works, but the movie doesn't start until the entire movie is loaded– and a generic 'image' icon is shown in place of the movie until it begins. most of my movies are small enough that it probably doesn't matter that much, but some of them are, and i'd rather not have the blink of that icon there, either.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
heh, commenting again in my own blog
this looks like an nice solution. even though his example is HTML 4 transitional, it validates in XHTML 1.0 transitional as well, and it streams the movie in IE/windows.
the only thing that doesn't seem to work are <param> tags in IE/mac (which i need). admittedly, that's a small audience, but my sister uses IE/mac, so i have to consider that, heh.
i might end up using some ideas from that flashobject script rather than the whole thing. hmmm we'll see.