Search
Related Links
W3C Compliance & Macromedia Flash
Remember the "Good Housekeeping Seal?"
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium seal of quality assurance
for your website, providing guidelines to insure your website
will look and function properly, regardless of the browser,
resolution or device that you use. In other words it assures
your website is clean of bugs and glitches and can be
successfully listed on all search engines.
Everyone needs a properly functioning web site that performs
well in the SERP's (search engine result pages) for business
practices. According to the SEO experts at Beanstock, many
examples of their sites perform better after they were brought
into compliance with W3C standards
After reading the above mentioned article I decided to do some
light housekeeping on our own website
http://www.ValorCrossMedia.com. It was time to dust off the
cobwebs and bring it up to W3C compliance standards to enhance
SERP performance.
Valor Cross Media specializes in Creative Web Services such as
Online Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Marketing and
Flash Video presentations for the web so SERP performance is a
top priority for our business.
To my surprise it was easier said than done. I could not
validate our home page for hours.
'HAH!' I thought. 'I have 15+ years of design experience, 10
exclusively online, so I should be able to do this. After all,
it is only cleaning up the markup, changing some attributes,
right?'
It was back to the drawing board and a few hours on Google doing
research.
I finally came up with an article titled "Flash Satay: Embedding
Macromedia Flash While Supporting Standards." on Macromedia.com
"Flash Satay's" author Drew McLellan, in an article originally
published in "A List Apart" writes, "embed" is not part of the
XHTML specification and will prevent your page from validating.
It is used by Netscape and similar browsers for displaying Flash
movies. Parameters are passed within the element as name/value
attribute pairs."
McLellan goes on to say, "Netscape created the "embed" tag as a
way to embed plug-ins and players in web pages. The "embed" tag
is not part of the XHTML specification, and although some
browsers other than Netscape do support it, it's not compliant
with the standards, so you shouldn't use it."
'O.K,' I thought, 'So there are some obstacles, but we're
getting closer to solving the problem. Our home page contains an
embedded Macromedia Flash movie. The solution is to clean the
markup and change some attributes.'
In a follow up to the Flash Satay article McLellan also
states:"Flash has built in security measures which make life
really tough. If the Flash player thinks the movie is being
loaded from a different domain to that of the page in which it
is embedded, it gives up and does nothing. It would also seem
that it's very easy to confuse the Flash player into thinking
that this is the case. Flasher, beware!"
Hours later after cleaning up the markup and changing
attributes, I thought my page was finally ready to be validated
for W3C compliance. I found it worked fine in Netscape and
Mozilla but when I tried it in Internet Explorer (IE) it stopped
dead in its tracks.
Was it a security measure in the Flash Player that stopped the
movie or the Internet Explorer setting up rules of their own?
All of a sudden memories of Netscape vs. IE back in the early
90s, when I started out as a web designer, flashed through my
mind. Remember how CSS was only viewable in IE back then?
I decided that until the browsers, Macromedia and Microsoft,
decide to play together I had better find a creative solution to
get the job done.
I dusted off an old browser detection and redirection script
found on NetMechanic.com that simply detects the browser and
redirects your page. The script is useful when you modify it to
redirect users to a page optimized for their particular
browsers. While you'll have to spend time optimizing your
individual pages for different browsers, the script itself is
very easy.
Finally, I created two separate pages; one optimized for IE,
which is validated with the W3C seal for CSS and a second page
optimized for browsers like Netscape, Mozilla, etc. to be
validated for the XHTML specifications which they support. The
java script detects the browser and redirects to an appropriate
page. To see an example of this, try opening
www.ValorCrossMedia.com in Mozilla browser and then try it in
IE. You will see the difference in the seal underneath the Flash
movie, though the pages remain the same.
The best part is they are both W3C compliant.
If you have comments, suggestions or creative solutions of your
own in reference to this article please drop us a note or visit
our blog http://www.valorcrossmedia.com/blogger.html
We'll be glad to hear from you.
If you would like to find out how Valor Cross Media can help you
please call 212 288-1866 or write to galina@valorcrossmedia.com
About the author:
Galina Arlov is a Creative Director for Valor Cross Media.