Click to activate this control?

[Christopera]

Is there anyway to get around this. I know sites like Cnet do it but am not sure how to get the flash be automatically activated.

[sandyw]

not sure what you want can you please give us an example...

sandy

[Christopera]

When building flash menu's I often see sites that it is required to click on the flash applet to "activate" it. At which point you can use the links. Is there a way to avoid this?

[Motoma]

What sites? Any examples for us?

Some tools like Adblock and Flashblock have a feature like this.

[Christopera]

http://eksamerica.com/

That site has a menu which requires activation.

Notice that when you hover the menu it does nothing. One click then activates it and the menu comes to life.

[Motoma]

http://eksamerica.com/

That site has a menu which requires activation.

Notice that when you hover the menu it does nothing. One click then activates it and the menu comes to life.

It works fine for me. I believe this is due to your web browser or certain plugins for it.

[iam_clint]

windows xp IE6 does this and i'm sure IE7 does.

[Christopera]

I have no tried FF but it does in in Opera and IE 7. IE even places a box around the control with a hover that says "press spacebar or enter to activate and use this control"

[Christopera]

Stumped, eh?

[Motoma]

Not stumped. We gave you an answer. This is a configuration setting in your browser. It is not supposed to be overridable. If you could override it, it would completely circumvent the tool!

[Christopera]

Would anybody being willing to devulge how exactly you can overide this then?

[nb109]

Rather than jumping on the guy because you can't answer his question, just keep quiet.

-- Edit by iam_clint : be nice now.

Truth be told, this is just another example of Microsoft designing IE to take certain design elements out of the hands of the web designer. Shortly after this "feature" was introduced, Microsoft and Adobe scrambled to provide designers with ways to override it because there were so many complaints. Most of these complaints came from the owners of sites that were already established and using active content, but were immediately crippled after this release.
Being that users have the choice and ability to manually disable active content any time they want, it seems silly that Microsoft would just mandate that their browser and only their browser would force it. All in all, this is just another example of poorly planned blunder on MS's part.

Anyway, enough with the ranting. I had to search out a solution after several clients requested a way around this craziness.

Here's Adobe's solution, since it has had the best results for me:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activeco...devletter.html

-- edit by clint: good review.

[Christopera]

Great! Thank you very much!

[anonymous]

Firstly my apologies for using an Bugmenot account.
I found this page while I was researching for my blogpost via Google. I just wanted to mention that IE and Opera implemented these changes not because they wanted to take power away from web developers, but because they didn't want to be sued by EOLAS.
You can learn more about that here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas#Browser_Changes
The solution from web developers end has already been mentioned in this thread. If you are a user, you can over ride this behaviour in Opera by using this userjs :http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/operaSt...ktoactivate.js

I would also reccomend that you check out http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blo...e-this-control

[cytan7411]

Another option that will work for both IE6/7, and Firefox is to take all of yoru code, and put it into a javascript and call it from there. Here is an example:

HTML CODE:

Goes in your HEAD tags:

<script src="flash_functions.js" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>
 

Goes into the place you want your flash to appear:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
call_menu();
</script>
 

JAVASCRIPT CODE (You are basically taking your HTML code, and placing it in between document.write('');):

function call_menu()
{
document.write('<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" width="766" height="69">\n');
document.write('<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />\n');
document.write('<param name="movie" value="flash/menu_v7.swf" />\n');
document.write('<param name="quality" value="high" />\n');
document.write('<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />\n');
document.write('<embed src="flash/menu_v7.swf" quality="high" scale="exactfit" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="766" height="69" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />\n');
document.write('</object>\n');
}
 

[iam_clint]

has anyone tried this?

<script>
window.onload = function() { document.getElementById("idoftheflash').click(); }
</script>

for an automatic click on the element

[kestrel]

is click() even part of javascript?

[chunk1978]

Great! Thank you very much!

Adobe's solution around active content in IE works fine, but the code can appear to be really messy... in my opinion, SWFObject is a far better solution, and it's way easier to customize... http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

also, Adobe's solution has been around since early last year and it was available as a small update to Flash 8. and Adobe Flash CS3 now has fully integrated active content support (incase you weren't aware).