ActionScript 3.0 Bible

Chapter 42. Deploying Flash on the Web

Programming your creation in ActionScript 3.0 is the first and most important step. Any successful project must also be deployed correctly. In most cases, Flash content is seen on the World Wide Web, within your web browser. There are other possibilities for your content, such as a screensaver or a kiosk, that typically require third-party tools to implement. AIR applications are deployed for desktop operating systems, and Flash Professional CS5 and later can package your application as an iPhone app. But this chapter covers the important issues in preparing your Flash content for deployment on the web.

Embedding Flash in a Page

If you are developing Flash content for the web, at some point you have to embed your SWF in an HTML page. This process is a stroll in the park, but unfortunately the park is strewn with land mines.

Rendering Flash in a web page requires the Flash Player plug-in. Despite the fact that browsers have been around for nearly two decades, there are still differences in plug-in architectures and the HTML that should be used to embed them. To wit, Internet Explorer uses ActiveX controls, and Mozilla browsers use the NSPlugin architecture. Different tags have been used to embed content: the <embed> tag and the <object> tag. Browsers even implement these tags in slightly different ways. To complicate matters, writing valid [X]HTML is desirable, and often required, but the <embed> tag is not valid in HTML 4 or XHTML 1, although ...