Hello, all. I just wrapped up a first draft of my first major
Flash animation and sent it down to our internet development folks,
who surprisingly seem to know less about it than I do. I work for a
State agency and the place isn’t exactly awash with talent and
know-how. That being the case, I’d like to have a clue before
having to deal with them directly.
If we post this swf to our web site can we reasonably expect
that most people will be able to view it? Does Internet Explorer
regularly prompt users to update their Shockwave plugin? What about
other browsers? And finally, what exactly is the difference between
the Flash Player and the Shockwave plugin?
In short, what steps or precautions do we need to take to
make the file as universally accessible as possible?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.|||
What you have asked is a giant ball of wax and really not
easy to answer.
First, you shouldn’t use direct links to swfs. Most swfs are
embedded into an html page. The html page handels a bunch of the
stuff regarding how the swf will be displayed. Flash will generate
a basic html page if you select the option in the publish
preferences.
The next issue is that a (few?) years ago there was a lawsuit
against Microsoft that affected the way content could be embedded
in pages. So if you just embed the swf in an html page and the user
comes to the page using IE they will get the dreaded “Click to
Activate this Control” message. That is not good.
The new version of Flash (CS3) will publish a javascript file
to be called by the html page Flash generates which takes care of
this for you. I haven’t used that so I don’t know so much about it.
I used an earlier solution called SWFObject by Geoff Stearns
(sp?) which does something similar. The SWFObject also gives the
ability to specify which version of Flash plugin is required to
play your swf. So I like that approach.
You have to decide what features you are using and which
version of the Flash player you expect to use. Is your content so
cool that people will willingly update to Flash 9 or will you loose
people? That whole aspect is a difficult question and nobody can
really answer that for you.
If you are going to use decent video, then Flash 7 is your
minimum. Flash 8 has better video and a lot of cool things you can
do with bitmaps. Flash 9 is a whole nother ball of wax.
Finally if you work for a State agency there are bound to be
all kinds of requirements for accessibility and such that we can
only guess at. So you should research those as well.|||
PS: David Stiller who often posts in these forums recently
blogged about something which may be of interest to you.
http://www.quip.net/blog/2008/flash/progressive-enhancement-with-flash|||
Thanks for the input, Rothrock. I really appreciate your
taking the time to respond.|||
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetr ation.html
|||
Excellent link, squadjot. I thank you.
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