— Shang Liang

I’ve slowly developed some negative feelings about Flash websites. “I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life (web) than being really, really good looking.”

When I saw the get the glass website, my jaw fell off. But after I played for half an hour, I didn’t get any idea of what the product is about. Has Flash gone too far?

• getURL fails to open new window in a popup window
  • If the flash is held in a popup window, getURL with a "_blank" target fails to open a new window in IE7, e.g. getURL("http://www.google.com", "_blank", "GET"). You need to call "window.open" function in javascript, getURL("javascript:window.open(‘http://www.google.com’)", "_self","GET").
• http://localhost makes IE7 behave strangely
  • As one of Microsoft’s anti-phishing approach, the URL of a web page should be always visible to the user. But if you test on localhost, IE7 won’t show the URL if the window’s toolbar is set to false
  • screen.availWidth and screen.availHeight don’t work properly if use localhost. It seems it returns screen.width and screen.height.
  • If you use http://127.0.0.1, everything works well.
• popup window has a minimum width 250

Last time I suggested deleting DOCTYPE line to solve the problem that full browser Flash not working in Firefox. A lot of people said it wasn’t a good practice. The problem can be solved by setting body height to 100% or using loose.dtd DOCTYPE. After Firefox 2.0 was out, removing the DOCTYPE line became the only solution. But I’m more worried about future browser releases, such as

If you define a variable name as “private” in Javascript, Safari will terminate your code from there. It doesn’t give any error message. This only happens in Safari. IE/IE7, Mozilla Firefox and Opera don’t have this problem. I think the keyword “private” and “public” is conserved for some function in Safari, some OOP thing? Wasted quite a few hours in it…

I had some problem loading an external CSS today. Flash kept giving me unable to load error. Because the project requires receiving a full path from the server side to load external files, I was trying to figure out which path was given wrongly. After 1 hour or so I realized the problem is the CSS itself. I copied some lines from live docs and then my style sheet start with “//this is the style sheet”. Lesson learned is that style sheet doesn’t support “//” comments. In HTML it doesn’t give much problem. Only the first style is ignored but Flash doesn’t tolerate any mistakes.

The best way for Flash sites’ search engine optimization (SEO) would be using backend scripting to detect the user agent and generate a full HTML file for search engines. But of course, the server must support CGI scripts, php, perl, asp ect and the devoloper must know how to use it. If you don’t know how to do CGI or you want to get some quick fix, read on.

Days ago one of the local market had some problem with mc_tween file. The #include “mc_tween2.as” line is there but nothing shows up.

The problem is, when you create a full browser Flash embed code, something like this,

<object bla bla… width=”100%” height=”100%”…>
..
<embed bla bla… width=”100%” height=”100%”…/>
</object>

the code works fine in IE but failed in FireFox, Mozilla, Nescape etc…