Options for Flash Files

[brian22201]

The homepage of a site that I've been working on features a relatively small flash element.

We've been hovering at 11-13 on Google for a top keyword for some time, but I'm thinking the flash piece may be what's holding us back.

Anyone have suggestions for any tags we could use to include the text that's used in the flash piece w/in the HTML coding?

Any tips would be much appreciated! :)

[mcanerin]

Flash is a tough one if you care about standards. If you want your page to validate with Flash on it, the only way to do it is to put the alternative text into the Object.

<rant>However, Firefox, which is normally a very nice browser, chokes on this - I wish they would actually support standards and THEN add cool options - it's annoying when software programmers add cool options instead of standards support - MS, Netscape and most others are all also guilty of this. </rant>

No one has complained about me linking to resources on my own site yet, but I'm getting sensitive about it so I'll just tell you that there is an article on my site that shows you all the options and lets you experiment with the options.
You can use noembed, noscript or the (proper) object heirarchy and all work with Google.

Right now, Flash does this:


<!--flash text in a COMMENT so that search engines TOTALLY IGNORE IT!
<Object blah blah blah>
<embed> exact same same blah blah but now readable by netscape</embed>
<object>
What I would do in a commercial environment is to take the useless (but pregenerated and accurate) comment text and links and put it into a <noembed> tag, since making it work for customers is more important than standards - though if certain programmers were competent you would not have to make that choice... (oops, was that another rant?)

Probably the best choice for compatibility with the most browsers is adding a <noembed> tag containing your formatted text information right after the <embed> tag:

<Object blah blah blah>
<embed> exact same same blah blah but now readable by Netscape</embed>
<noembed>Put your flash text in here</noembed>
<object>
What I'm showing you here is a hack and intended only for search engines. But it works very well.

What I would do for a proper, cutting edge website with proper accessability and standards, is use the W3C version and tell Firefox owners to get a "real" browser like IE. That should piss off enough of them to make the mozzies actually do their damn job right and maybe even RTFM... (oops, on a rant roll again...)

The proper (W3C) method is:

<Object blah blah blah>
<embed> exact same same blah blah but now readable by netscape</embed>
Put your flash text in here
<object>
But Firefox handles this poorly. The search engines handle it no problem. So does Lynx and most other browsers, old or new. It also works better for people with screen readers (which is the true target group for alt text).

Since I really like Firefox, I would prefer to have it fixed, myself.

Ian