Andrew Poulos wrote:
With "normal" SWF HTML there's an EMBED tag nested within an OBJECT tag.
How can I check which tag is actually displaying the SWF? I'm using CSS
on them and the style on the OBJECT affects the EMBED tag so I'm going
to use some code to correct it but I can't tell which tag is responsible
for the display.
If you refer to the usual object-embed structure, that by the way is
invalid html because of the embed, the outer container is an ActiveX
object. This is easy to spot because of the very long special ActiveX
id, that is different for flash, WMP, Real etc. Usually ActiveX works
only for IE browsers and close relatives, although recent Opera
browsers seem to use some trick to play a WMP ActiveX only object even
though they are unlikely support ActiveX. However there are special
ActiveX plugins for Mozilla family browsers for a few formats such as
WMP, but few likely have these installed. If the ActiveX object is not
supported by the browser, then most browsers will take the invalid
embed path written within the ActiveX object, but it usually works,
because most browsers have not yet removed support for the invalid
embed tag.
If you are not sure what path is being taken, just remove the embed tag
and everything else following to and including the close embed tag. If
the page then works, you are supporting the ActiveX object. If the page
does not work, the viewing browser will not support the ActiveX object.
Some browsers will support both the ActiveX object and an embed path.
In this case, the ActiveX path is used when the embed path is within
the ActiveX object path.
Of course, even for flash, it is possible to avoid using embed by using
a special ordinary object, but it is a bit more complicated than for
the case of WMP audio or video.
