Have your flash and validate too

Writing standards-compliant code on our sites is an important goal here at Digital Positions. Correct code will (ideally) render the same across platforms and be easier to maintain. Not to mention it produces a warm fuzzy feeling when your page validates. So as I set out to write the html template for DP Blog, I really wanted to make sure it conformed to the standards. It's structured with html and styled with css.

So all is going well, then Ben wanted to add the little flash nugget author pictures. Well there went my valid code! Flash exports a default tag structure to include your movie with. It's large and uses the embed tag for non-IE browsers. The reason is that supposedly browsers which use Netscape-style plugins can't understand the object tag. Fortunately, this is not true. Instead support for the object tag is... spotty. I found an excellent article at A List Apart that explained the details for getting all the browsers to play nice with the object tag. It worked great... everywhere except that rascally IE5 Mac. As it turns out, IE5 mac doesn't support flashVars as a param. The solution? Pass those flash vars in the query string.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="/media/swf/blogheadbar.swf?blogAuthor=100101"  width="555" height="31">

<param name="movie" value="/media/swf/blogheadbar.swf?blogAuthor=100101" />

<param name="quality" value="high" />

</object>

So, minor crisis averted, DP Blogs is valid. Someday it might even be XHTML!