Posted by Toby A Inkster on 01/31/07 09:39

Andy Dingley wrote:

> So what's wrong with Flash satay and how should it be done better?
> Assuming a level of ignorance as I describe above, how should a "HTML
> competent" developer best slap a video onto a page?

The end solution is actually quite good.

You know how in the maths classes at school, you're often required to show
your workings. Perhaps there is one mark for getting the right answer in
the end, but the rest for using the right techniques. That way, if someone
uses the correct methods to get to the answer, but forgets to, say, carry
a one at the penultimate stage, they still can get most of the marks.

Anyway: Flash Satay; one mark for the correct answer; zero marks for the
workings.

The Flash Satay article shows the author blindly adding and removing
things from his code until he gets something that both validates and
works. At no point does the author seem to be aware of which bits are
proprietary rubbish, and which bits need to stay there for functionality.
He seems to arrive at the correct answer mostly by trial and error.

In reality, the answer for how to embed a Flash object in HTML is
pretty damn obvious by just looking at the HTML spec. The only detail
that's non-obvious is the correct MIME type to use for Flash, but that
can be looked up on Google in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps he knew what he was doing all along and just wrote it that way to
make better reading.

Anyhow, the one useful technique in that article what couldn't have been
learnt from looking at the OBJECT definition in the HTML spec, or ten
seconds of Googling is the idea of a redirector Flash object to help with
streaming. This technique was already being used with great effect for
video and audio files (ASX, RAM and M3U playlists), but he provides source
code for achieving this effect in Flash, which I don't think was
particularly prevalent before the article was published.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/CSS/Javascript/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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