I’ve been using SWFObject for quite a while now and it amazes me that developers out there still don’t know about it, especially with all the news around Microsoft’s EOLAS case late last year.
SWFObject is a tasty method for embedding Macromedia Flash content into your web pages and has (among others) the following functionality which alone are reason to be using it!
- Flash detection
- Search engine friendly
- Validates to HTML and XHTML (as long as pages sent as text/html, not application/xhtml+xml.)
- Degrades beautifully!
All you need to do is add your .js file in the <head>:
Then use the following code:
This text is replaced by the Flash movie.
Note the <div id=”flashcontent”>? Inside this div is where you’ll store any HTML to be displayed if the user doesn’t have flash. So you can have a link to Adobe to get the latest flash player, an alternate image or simply display HTML!
One problem I had is with users on low bandwidth seeing this HTML (non-flash) content before the Flash has a chance to load. To get around this I had the content within the non-flash div hidden (using CSS) then onload() make it visible.
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