» The Fix for the Patch.. I say NO! - neurofuzzy, flash game development, rich internet applications, free source code

3/9/2006

The Fix for the Patch.. I say NO!

Filed under: Commentary, Flash, General — geoff @ 7:37 pm

I have a bad feeling about this Javascript workaround for the IE Eolas Patch. This is only my opinion, but hey, I have a blog, so therefore I write. I don’t think it’s kosher for a couple of reasons. The first, and major one, is that using document.write to display primary content on a page is bad form.

It feels hacky. It relies on the user having javascript turned on, and makes pages more kludgy and slow. Since it uses doc.write, it is invisible to search engines. Sure, Google has trouble reading Flash, but eventually it will be able to. If everyone’s using document.write to push their Flash onto the page, search engines will never find it.

It’s a step backward for making Flash more integrated and accessible on the web. Will screenreaders recognize content that is placed on the screen in this way? I don’t know. The point is, it adds another element of complexity. If the object is written by javascript, how can we validate it? If there are a lot of objects on the page, the XHTML begins to reflect the actual content of the page less and less.

I may sound like I’m rambling, and I guess I am, because it’s mostly a gut feeling that I’m describing. This fix makes me feel all oogy inside. It feels impure.

Another side to this is that, if every developer hops-to and fixes this with their javascript workaround, it takes the pressure off of Microsoft to fix their browser. And what if they eventually dump ActiveX altogether, or find another way to fix this? Do we all hop-to again and put our pages back the way they are supposed to be?

My feeling is, this is a step backward to the 90’s when we were browser-sniffing and coding pages differently for each browser. What we should be doing is coding pages using W3C standards, and let Microsoft and the other browser-makers worry about making their browsers work, not the other way around.

Comments »

We are going back to W3C standards as Object and Embed were never part of HTML to begin with. Simply using doc.write doesn’t solve the problem anyway. You still have to call that file w/ doc.write via an external .js or some other way. Having inline doc.writes still makes the patch affect your flash. This is with my testing,anyway. I’m using the FlashOject that is going around becuase it is xhtml, css compliant etc.. and allows for your alt content to get spidered by the search engines.

Comment by MK — 3/9/2006 @ 7:45 pm

HERE HERE!!! Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Comment by Josh — 3/9/2006 @ 8:07 pm

“We are going back to W3C standards as Object and Embed were never part of HTML to begin with.”

They actually were. The spec was, in my opinion at the time and now, in error in not advising how the world could migrate to their new platonic ideal. (The spec outlawed EMBED many years after it was in realworld use, and when I asked on web-standards lists in the late 90s “how will we migrate?” I could never pull a reply.)

That’s an interesting point, about “How will search engines react to the JavaScript document.write which the patent requires?” My first take is that bodytext is overrated as a search qualifier anyway… usually it’s the inbound links which determine things (cf “Googlebombing”), and after that the TITLE, metadata and other standard qualifiers which play more of a role than bodytext. But it’s an interesting question you raise here, one I hadn’t heard before, and I’d like to think on it some more….

(Yes, JAWS and WindowEyez do understand dynamically-added content… Andrew Kirkpatrick tested results here.)

Comment by John Dowdell — 3/9/2006 @ 9:04 pm

I’m with you on this one.. I don’t like the hack at all.. but.. I’ll probably cave in and use it on my pages rather than punish the users for a problem that Microsoft created. hmm.. maybe I should add something in the doc.write so a message is displayed for IE users. Or better yet, send them to a random page on Microsoft.com. Let’s see them find something useful on that site.

Comment by mike — 3/9/2006 @ 9:29 pm

I’m sorry, but I absolutely love FlashObject and since I started using it last year all my applications are now completely unaffected by this patch. http://osflash.org/flashobject

Comment by John Giotta — 3/9/2006 @ 10:48 pm

another positive vote for flashobject from me!

it’s too bad embed got deprecated, because it’s still the tag that is most reliably and consistently rendered across browsers and platforms.

Comment by bunnyhero — 3/12/2006 @ 1:12 pm

I don’t think it’s a ‘hack’ at all. Personally I’ve always used JavaScript to write out the flash object because it lets me do it in two lines of JavaScript instead of many lines of HTML - and also helps to eliminate possible bugs that can creep in due to updating a value in the OBJECT tag then forgetting to do it in the EMBED tag.

I also don’t think that ‘it relies on having JavaScript turned on’ is a convincing argument - it’s easy enough to set up your code in such a way that it warns the user if they’re got JavaScript switched off and tells them they need it switched.

Your comment about search engines is very valid though, although I’m sure there must be other ways of ensuring a search engine can index your content.

What winds me up about all this is that the EOLAS patent only applies in the USA - yet Microsoft’s response to it affects users and developers all over the world. Only users in the States should be obliged to apply the patch - maybe then americans will realise how stupid software patents are and stop using them!

Comment by MOLOKO — 4/12/2006 @ 9:07 am

Thanks for the information! I’ve been looking all over for an answer to this problem.

Comment by Internet — 4/15/2006 @ 11:10 pm

I agree that this javascript fix is backwards thinking.
However, there are already people who are capitalizing
on this stupid fix, making software to create the code.