We’ve been using SWFObject for quite some time to insert Flash content into a website. It’s a great way to get around the <embed> tag and remove the dreaded IE “click to activate this control” message.
Lately, we’ve started to use Flashvars as opposed to external XML files to generate the content in the Flash files. We really like this approach for a few reasons. First, the content is in the HTML page directly, which means there is one less file to manage. Second (and this is a big one), if your SWF looks for an XML file to load content, the browser tends to cache that content. So the next time you visit the page, you will see the cached content even if you’ve replaced and updated your XML file. In this situation, the user has to manually clear their cache and reload the page to see the new content. The problem here is that most users don’t clear their cache all that often. So you run the risk of users seeing old, outdated content, even though you’ve spent the time to update it. So our solution recently has been to use Flashvars when we can.
A good example of this can be seen on our new website. The panels right underneath the clouds on the top of all the pages have text in them. They have a headline, sub-header, and a paragraph of text. The headline and sub-header are part of the SWF file and thus require us to either use an XML file, put the text directly in the Flash file itself (not very friendly for updates), or use Flashvars. Here’s how we did it (in the <head> of our document):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | <script src="js/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <!-- Load SWFObject --> <script type="text/javascript"> var flashvars = {mainTitle: "Functional, interactive design.", subTitle: "Three words that mean more to us than you'd think."}; var params = {wmode: "transparent", allowFullScreen: "false"}; var attributes = {}; swfobject.embedSWF("flash/workheader.swf", "flash-work", "950", "195", "9.0.0", "flash/expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes); </script> |
You need to be using the latest version of SWFObject (version 2) to do this. The benefits of using Flashvars is that the browser shouldn’t cache old XML data, it’s easier to maintain (i.e. less files to work with), and it’s written in the HTML document directly.
Rareview January 18, 2010 at 7:44 am
Doofus, I seriously doubt that Flash is going to be dead next year. However, I do think you’re correct that the complications Flash presents for developers, mobile devices, and search engines has steered people towards things like jQuery. But it still has it’s place – with video, audio, and complex animation. For example, we just finished a huge Flash animated family tree and that couldn’t have been done in any other way as effectively as it was done in Flash. In general though, we are definitely working a lot more with Javascript (jQuery) and CSS over Flash, which does seem to be the future.