[thelist] Flash in Search engine and Standards friendly way

[Kasimir K]

Hello,

I came across interesting article [1] on how to embed plugins in HTML, 
and it brought some ideas.

Usually SWFs are embeded first with <object>, and within that with 
<embed>. The <object> contains obtainment mechanism for ActiveX control, 
and the <embed> gives the pluginspage for Netscape.

The standards friendly way would be to use only <object>, but then it's 
not possible to provide a cross-browser obtainment mechanisms. But I 
think this is actually a good thing: this way people who haven't 
installed flash, are not forced or even prompted to install it now. 
Instead they see the alternative content within the object element, as 
will search engines too.

So a good way to embed flash would be using <object>, not giving 
codebase attribute, but giving good alternative content in it.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="flash.swf">
    <h1>good content</h1>
    <a href="google_food.html">more good content</a>
    <img src="picture_of_flash_swf.png">
</object>

And if menu needs to be done in flash, provide text only menu (with nice 
css of course) as alternative content.

Thoughts?


.kasimir


[1] http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/markup-and-plugins/