Webpage content underneath Flash content

So, you’ve got a website that you’ve made and you’ve used a Flash movie on it.  Okay, no worries.  Now, what if you tried to add a (non-form-element) drop-down menu or some AJAX-ed content into the site, and found the Flash movie actually acted as an overlay?

This problem doesn’t seem consistent.  Different OSs, browsers, and Flash versions don’t indicate consistency - that’s what I’ve seen anyway.  Nevertheless, the problem persists for some users and it’s down-right annoying.

The fix?  Make your Flash code look similar to this:

<object data="my-movie.swf …

in Web · Fri 12 June 2009

Plone How-To: XHTML Compliant Flash Insertion

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 · Tue 13 January 2009