The Back Button

This is a good news day for online Flash Platform developers. Microsoft has finally managed to open its FAT wallet and pay EOLAS for the ability to “… automatically invoke external applications providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document” .. basically get rid of the whole ‘Click To Activate’ thing.

Though to be fair to M$, this patent is the biggest mound of crap ever! They shouldn’t of had to deal with it in the first place if the patent system was fair. But even though it’s a B.S. patent, MS shouldn’t have passed the mess onto everybody else. The whole ‘Click to Activate’ problem just goes to show that Microsoft cares more about money than it does about UX. In-fact, this is probably just one if a million examples .. haha.

So what does this mean now? Do we all abandon our JavaScript embed workarounds and revert back to hard coding the embed code back into HTML? Well, I think that maybe the whole EOLAS mess might of been a wake up call to way we do embed our Flash. Having a JavaScript wrapper only improves the flexibility of our embedding and also makes all those W3C syntax checker nuts happy. But on the other hand, the hard embed worked in the past, so there is no reason why it wont work just as well in the future. Is there?

Well, if your looking for direction on this matter, my advice is to keep your JavaScript workarounds. You never know when/if EOLAS will go knocking the doors of other browser vendors. And as far as I know, the Opera browser will still have the ‘Click to Activate’ implementation.

This news form Microsoft is too little too late, the damage has been done. JavaScript workaround are now the norm and are here to stay .. thanks EOLAS .. *pause* .. NOT!

For the official dates and details from Microsoft .. Click Here