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There's a great project called swfobject that does all the browser/flash player version checking people want javascript for. But the great thing is that it'll fallback to non-javascript methods if not available. I don't know why more sites don't use it.

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

And you can even use this method to substitute alternate content if Flash isn't installed.

I've used it to make 100% valid pages, and it works very well.

Last time I looked, there was no way of embedding Flash in a page that validates and actually works in most browsers.

Look again.

The whole 'click to activate' thing can be bypassed by using Javascript to embed your plugin/activex content.

It's really easy, and there's a number of solutions for embedding Flash and Quicktime content. (And these methods make it much easier to embed the content and detect the presence of the plugin anyway. Many people are already using it, like youtube.com for example.

The whole 'click to activate' thing can be bypassed by using Javascript to embed your plugin/activex content.

It's really easy, and there's a number of solutions for embedding Flash and Quicktime content. (And these methods make it much easier to embed the content and detect the presence of the plugin anyway. Many people are already using it, like youtube.com for example.

I've been working for a web design company, and we've been doing alternative content on pages for a long time. Not an SEO optimizations, but more like using FlashObject for Flash , sIFR for headers and a few other "change h1 tag contents to image" OR "welcome to our website, you're seeing this text because you don't have css enabled' tricks.

Does anyone know how google treats alternative content? I mean - I'm happy that I'm listed in google, but since some flash alernatives tend to be descriptive (especially for product preentations) I'm not sure what google people think about that.

Thanks for help.

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I couldn't help but notive that someone has just hacked the webpage for Geoff Stearns Flash Object. That seems to be the only page on the server effected. Was that done by someone here? Is someone here threatened by Flash? If so why?

Flash has an open specification and there are open source tools for creating it. Open Source isn't all about creating One True Implementation - attacking people supporting technologies you claim you don't even use doesn't make sense. Does it make you sad to think that other people might be happy? Chewbacca lives on Endor...

- firstly, and this is very important, if a page is made entirely in flash then a search engine can't glean text from it when it comes to crawl it if all your content is compiled into a swf. true, flash will publish your text as html comments, but this is a fairly lame work-around as keywords in comments don't rank particularly highly in google's algorithms. at least with a site that uses ajax, its first state will be accessable to text crawlers. Actually AJAX apps suffer from this same issue when most of the content is fed in dynamically to avoid page refresh issues. And I know the arguement is going to be that there is HTML content on the page initially and that part can be searched and indexed by search engine. This is actually possible with Flash as well by using Geoff Stearns Flash Object. This method will act as a detection script as well as provide static HTML content on the page for search engine. - secondly, jpg images look crusty in flash. even with jpg quality settings set high you still get a worse looking bitmap image than if you placed the image in html. so, flash, good for vectors, crap for bitmaps. In most cases this is an authoring issue and not a technology issue. There where a few bugs in some early players that caused a pixel shit, which was easy enough to work around. Flash can actually display the same image without noticable loss in quality yet at a much reduced size than a standard browser... I think thats a benefit to flash. - the quality of text rendered in a swf is fairly terrible when it's small (i.e., your normal 10-12pt 'screen' height). unless you set the text properties to be 'dynamic', which limits how you can use it. Somewhat true, yet again this can be looked at as an authoring issue. Theres has been some well documented ways to offer very crisp clean text in Flash that's easy enough to read just by making sure the text is on a pure pixel and not a half pixel. As a benefit however Flash offers support for any font you want, and therefore opens the doors wide open for fonts that may be easier to read, look better, etc... that standard HTML cannot offer. - text is unselectable (again, unless it has been set to 'dynamic' which it rarely is) so if people want to copy and paste something from your site then tough luck to them. As was mentioned this is an authoring issue, not a technology issue i use flash all the time, but not to build whole sites with. it's perfect for small embedded sections. but what ajax ultimately has over flash is that it uses native internet technolgies, and so many things from spiders to users rely on the web being the web. If people where just using AJAX to display data and refresh sections of the page for content I would agree that they are using native (but not standard) current (with no absolute garuntee of future support) internet technologies. However when developers start heading down the road of 'Flash like emulation' using javascript for animation, effects, etc... that arguement begins to loose water. Mnay techniques people are using to emulate Flash are makeing use of browser dependant support and requires the code to degrade for users of other browsers. This to my is bad as you punish users for not choosing your browser of choice (which is the same naive arguement people use against Flash by the way). People want to talk about not relying on a company for support... they do that already...they rely on Microsoft to display over 80% of their content. And Microsoft has a track record of making things 'different just to be different'....

It should definetly cover the pros and cons of using xhtml. Some of the disadvantages of XHTML are that you can't embed flash movies straight forwardly (http://blog.deconcept.com/2004/10/14/web-standard s-compliant-javascript-flash-detect-and-embed/) .
You cannot make tables streach to bottom of page, because html, body {width: 100%} is not supported and I think you cannot use the target= attribute.
The only advantage that I can see is that you web page will have street cred (this is useful if you are selling web design services)