Plone How-To: XHTML Compliant Flash Insertion

// under filtering flash parameters plone xhtml

Wow, it seems easy doesn’t it. Just add an object tag, params, and embed and we’re done, right? Well, sure, if we didn’t want to adhere to W3C standards.

To do the right thing, we need something like this:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="movie.swf" width="100" height="100">
    <param name="movie" value="movie.swf" />
    <img src="alt.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt="" />
</object>

Not much to it there, and this is available everywhere on the web. It validates okay, and that’s what we need.

However, if you follow normal procedure for sticking this in Plone (disable filtering of the relevant object and param tags in HTML Filtering (Plone Control Panel), then make a Page with this code), you’ll see it won’t work in IE.

Much hair-tearing and searching led me to find that the rendered Page is missing the param tag in the source XHTML. Huh?!?, you say - I just disabled the filtering. Why’s it not there?!.

Sure, you did. What noone told you is that you need to go into the ZMI -> portal_transforms -> safe_html and tell Plone that the param tag is an empty tag (like <img />). In the list of valid_tags, set param to be 0. Save this page.

Now try it again in IE. Looking at the source in both should show the param tag now, and your Flash should show up just fine once you convince IE to refresh.

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