check if flash is installed

[wjh2303]

ive had a quick google and forum seach and cant readily find the solution im after.

Unfortunately some of my pages have flash elements do display images. Untill now ive just left it at that, so anyone visiting my site with flash not installed/enabled is going to see a confusing/ugly page when they get to it.

How can i determine if a visitor had flash so that i can do something along the lines of:

if(flash is installed)
print the code to displat the page as normal
else
print explanation that flash is required*


Presumably in JS or something

*or redirect to non-flash version of the page that could be created at a later date

TIA

 

[misson]

ive had a quick google and forum seach and cant readily find the solution im after.

Google search: flash alternate content. One of the better pages is the third result, "Providing alternative content for SWF files". "Flash Embedding Cage Match" on A List Apart covers various implementations. Whatever you pick, make sure it works if JS isn't supported (which is much more likely given that Flash isn't supported)

The simplest implementation comes from from the HTML standard, section 13.3.1 "Rules for rendering objects":

If the user agent is not able to render the object for whatever reason (configured not to, lack of resources, wrong architecture, etc.), it must try to render its contents.

Just put the alternate content in the <object> element.

 

[zen-r]

I've recently been looking at building a website using a Flash/ xml driven template, & have been wondering about all sorts of issues including the one you mention, plus others such as how to still keep the website search engine friendly.

In the course of the brief research I've done so far, I found this kit & info from Adobe which should help with the detection ; http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/download/detection_kit/.

I'll probably have to start a thread of my own at some point, asking for advice on the various issues.

I've discovered so far that Adobe have recently produced the software for search engines such as Google to be able to crawl Flash-only sites for the text they contain - enabling them to now be indexed properly. But it seems that Flash sites still have a major disadvantage in getting good ranking compared to sites which also contain html etc. There seem to be various techniques to help get round this, but it's too advanced for me at this stage.

Obviously, the advantage of integrating html with Flash sites is that not only do they get crawled & ranked better by Search Engines, but they are also accessible by people who don't have/won't allow scripts & Flash to run in their browser.

Please keep this thread updated with what you find out & the progress you make - it will be very useful to me & others in a similar position.

P.S. Here is a Flash template which I am interested in purchasing ; http://flashden.net/item/advanced-xml-website/20118?page=35

Does anyone have any idea how difficult it would be to design an html alternate for the Flash site, & if anyone on this forum was skilled enough, how much they would charge?

Alternatively, would it be easier for me to find another Flash template somewhere which already has alternate content designed in? If so, any recommendations for something which looks similar to the one I'm considering? Thanks.

 

[wjh2303]

@mission

That looks perfect ill give it a go, are there any major browsers that dont follow that standard that you know of?

@zen
Difficulty creating a html only sister site would depend on your competence/confidence with html and probably JS. However my issue was just over a small flash element to display images, similar to just the flash video player on youtube rather than a whole flash site, so yes you would probably be better off with your own thread, not to mention i believe many people would advise against having an entire site in flash, but i digres...