Flash 8 Cookbook

Chapter 21. Publishing Flash

After you’ve built your Flash animation or application, you need to publish it. Do you want to publish it to the Web? As a standalone executable? How do you want the content to scale? Does the Flash content need to communicate with the container application, such as the web browser? These are just a few of the many things you must ask when publishing Flash content. Each common scenario is discussed in this chapter.

21.1. Publishing Flash to the Browser

Problem

You want to publish an .swf file for playback in a web browser.

Solution

Select the HTML option in the Publish Settings, and publish from Flash. Optionally, add the <object> and <embed> tags to the HTML manually.

In either case, you must upload the .swf file as well as the HTML file when placing content on a web server.

Discussion

When you want Flash content to play back in a web browser, you must add the HTML code to embed the content in the HTML page. The code tells the browser to play back a specific .swf file in Flash Player. There are two Flash Player versions that can potentially be embedded within a web browser: the ActiveX player for Internet Explorer running on Windows and the Flash Player plug-in for the remaining browsers. Each player version requires different HTML code. For the ActiveX player, you must add an <object> tag, and for the plug-in, you must add an <embed> tag. Generally, you’ll want HTML code that can work in every browser, so you’ll need to add both the <object> and <embed> tags. ...