Adding Motion and Sound: Using SWFObject to Insert Flash Videos and Presentations
Apart from the traditional web stack, Adobeâs Shockwave Flash platform is currently the most popular tool used to integrate audio and video with traditional web content.
Those who want to simplify the process of publishing compiled Flash presentations on their sites should consider using a piece of openly available JavaScript called SWFObject, created by Geoff Stearns. SWFObject uses the DOM API and other interfaces to work around the hassles that accompany Flash content, in particular version detection.
Given production-ready Flash content and the current
swfobject.js file on the web server, a developer need
only call the swfobject.js file via a script element in the head of the document, insert a line of markup
into the production document, and follow that markup with another brief
fragment of JavaScript that creates an application-specific SWFObject object. That object in its turn
modifies the preceding markup to create and populate the element that
contains the desired Flash presentation.
It is also possible to write your own standards-compliant object markup and execute the SWFObject script
solely to gain access to version detection and other
features.
Note
As youâll see near the end of the chapter, HTML5 is introducing new solutions to address audio and video more directly, without Flash.
If you have a bare video file that needs to be placed online and you choose Flash as your playback environment, ...
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