Say I have a flash movie, and the alternate content is a static jpg image of the flash movie... easy as pie to do with SWFObject. If the user has flash installed, they see the flash movie. If not, they see the image instead. However, if the user has flash installed, the alternate image is STILL downloaded (at least when I tested locally using FireFox). It's like the browser sees that the img tag and starts downloading right before it's overwritten with the inline javascript. Can you think of any way to show truly alternate content instead of content that gets overwritten? Or can you think of any other way to stop the image linked to in the alternate content from downloading?

Ah, didn't realize that function returned anything. That should work perfect, thanks! And thanks for noting the javascript dependency issue--you're absolutely right, of course. The images are kind've large, which was why I wanted to have them not load unless necessary... but maybe I should just assume that anyone with flash installed should have a decent enough connection... Thanks again!