Flash® Professional CS5 Bible

Chapter 19. Integrating Flash Content with Web Pages

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining HTML tags and attributes for the Flash Player

• Detecting the Flash Player plug-in or ActiveX control with SWFObject

• Sending commands with the ExternalInterface API to JavaScript

If you're not one for automated HTML production by using templates, this chapter is for you. In this chapter, I teach you the ins and outs of the <object> and <embed> tags, as well as some tips on how to check for the Flash Player with Flash CS5's detection features or SWFObject. At the end of this chapter, I examine how Flash movies can interact with JavaScript and DHTML (Dynamic HTML) by using the new ExternalInterface actions from Flash.

Note

Many thanks to Geoff Stearns for his ongoing commitment to provide one of the best open source Flash Player detection scripts, SWFObject, to the Flash community. You can find more information about SWFObject later in this chapter.

Writing Markup for Flash Movies

In Chapter 18, you learn how to use the Publish feature, which included automated HTML templates. These templates created the necessary HTML tags to display Flash movies on Web pages. In this section, I discuss the use of Flash movies in your handwritten HTML documents. You can also use this information to alter HTML documents created by the Publish feature.

Note

In the following code examples, I use an asterisk (*) when displaying optional parameters that are not in the default options that are enabled in the Flash Only HTML template. I also ...