Stay Connected
Navigation

Home

About

Tutorials

Featured Sites

Newsletter

FLADownloads

Forum

Jayde

iEntry

Advertise

Contact Us







Fixing The "Click To Activate" Flash Content In IE

By Mads Kristensen
Expert Author
Article Date: 2006-10-31

In the good name of internet security, Microsoft added a feature in Internet Explorer that disables automatic activation of objects. All objects in an HTML <object> tag is affected and that includes Java applets and Adobe Flash content.

That means you manually have to click a Flash movie in order to activate it before you can use it.



If you have a Flash menu on your website, then the visitors have to click twice in order to navigate - one to activate and one to click the actual link. You don't want that!

Lucky for us, JavaScript can solve the problem quite easily. Just add this script to the <head> section of your HTML document.

<script type="text/javascript">
function ActivateFlash()
{
    var objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
    for (var i = 0; i < objects.length; i++)
    {
      objects[i].outerHTML = objects[i].outerHTML;
    }
}
</script>


And call the function from the tag like this:

<body onload="ActivateFlash();">

Of course, this is not a good solution, because you probably already have an included JavaScript file and don't want scripts mixed with your HTML. The obvious choice is to add the script to your .js file, and then add an event handler, so you don't need to call it with an onload-command from the tag.

Copy the function into your .js file and add the event handler line in top of that file:

window.onload = ActivateFlash

function ActivateFlash()
{
    var objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
    for (var i = 0; i < objects.length; i++)
    {
      objects[i].outerHTML = objects[i].outerHTML;
    }
}


By doing it this way, you don't have to pollute you're HTML with JavaScript in order to eliminate the Flash activation in Internet Explorer.

Comments

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

About the Author:
Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in 2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/



 
 
Newsletter Archive | Article Archive | Submit Article | Advertising Information | About Us | Contact | Site Map

FlashNewz is an iEntry.com publication
© 1998-2008 iEntry Inc. All Rights Reserved Privacy Policy Legal