1) If you want to pass specific parameters to the flash movie you can’t do it using param tags like you normally would - you would have to set them in the swf using the Stage object.

2) If you want to pass variables to the Flash movie by using url parameters, you are limited to the number of characters you can pass in a url string (some browsers have different limits than others)

3) Not all user agents will know how to run a swf movie that is linked directly from the server. Most modern browsers can handle this just fine, but what about new handhelds that might try to download the Flash movie? This could also happen if the web server is not configured with a mime type for Flash movies, causing your users to be prompted to download the .swf instead of displaying it in the browser.

4) You aren’t using any kinds of Flash detection, which means a user without the Flash plugin installed will not be able to view the Flash movie, and without the information in the html page telling the browser where to get the plugin files, the user will have no idea what type of plugin then need to view your file.

5) If a user as an older verion of the Flash player than your Flash movie needs, they may get unexpected behavior when they view your movie. (if they have Flash player 6 and your movie is a Flash 7 movie)

It’s not very difficult to make your Flash movies play at 100% with and height. I’ve recently posted a page that shows you exactly how to do it here.

meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.leuchtendgruen.net/luminousgreen.swf”

with this a flash application loads directly into the browser after zero seconds. in turn the swf is calling up xml data, images, audio, video and animations.

i started doing this because i wanted the swf to scale to 100% the browser window also on linux machines, for which the width=”100%” height=”100%” parameters of object and embed were not working consistently.

does you recognize possible problems with this method? please explain.

thanks in advance!

myFlashObj = new FlashObject("_assets/cyber-btns.swf", "cyber-btns_JOURNAL", "160", "30", 6, "#ffffff");
myFlashObj.addVariable("varLabel", "THE+JOURNAL");
myFlashObj.addVariable("varAction", "window%2Ealert%28%27JOURNAL%27%29");
[add the rest of your vars]
myFlashObj.write();


This is assuming that your movie is Flash 6 - you’ll have to add in each of the flashvars serperately as well.

I love you js code, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to implement it with regards (especially) to my flashvars code (below) … In the of my page, where the <object> would go, what do I need to do to simplify the currrent flash code below?

[code removed]

Since according to the w3c there is no such thing as an embed tag, I don’t want to use it when building a Flash embed that would be XHTML friendly. In fact, when using the DOM, Opera won’t even let you create an embed tag, so you are stuck with hacking the object tag together even though it has pretty crappy support for it like not able to append width and height to an object tag using DOM scripting methods.

As for Safari, anything you put in as param tags will be ignored, but to work around that, you can set everything as an attribute on the object tag instead. Unfortunately this won’t validate since there is no such thing as a flashvars attribute in the XHTML spec, but if you do it with Javascript it works and will validate.

The question of whether this is proper or not is of course another question, but since it won’t really work any other way, there isn’t much of a choice.

Safari seems to ignore the param tags inside the object tag

Are you saying that Safari won’t load parameters like FlashVars then? And as for the object tag, I was under the impression that Safari used the <embed> element, not <object>. Wrong?