There are a number of solutions out there for the limitation that Microsoft just put into place to deal with the Microsoft-Eolas plug-in patent dispute. The ones that I have seen (e.g: Flashobject) are nice but involve changing how you publish your Flash files and embed them into the HTML. I was thinking, it is possible to rewrite the HTML on the fly with JavaScript, so what if we just loop through all the Object tags within the Document Object Model, and replace the HTML? It could be done with one function call, and would not affect how you put the <object> and <embed> tags on the page.

The experiment that I tried does exactly that: it loops through all the <object> tags, and just replaces the HTML with exactly the same HTML. This makes IE think that the HTML is dynamically placed on the page, even though it started as just straight HTML.  Read more...

Just a little bit of shameless self-promotion: my book is just about to hit store shelves!

I’m the dude on the left, and my co-author on the right is Jeff Berg.

Man, that is a long process (probably about 1 year total from contract to publication). Prepurchase now! Buy them as Christmas presents, birthday presents, Bar Mitzvah presents, even chew-toys for your dogs! (Discounts for bulk purchases for 5 dogs or more). They also work great as monitor supports (about 3 inches per book). If you reeeeeeeeeeally want, you can even read it yourself and learn how to script with ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8 (perish the thought)!  Read more...

I have come across a couple of really useful Firefox extensions aside from the excellent web developer extension which I wanted to share with the community.

The first is called View Rendered Source Chart, which renders the HTML source in a way that is very easy to visually see the nesting.

The second is one called View Formatted Source, and not only shows your HTML source in a way where you can collapse nested tags, but when set to inline mode, shows you the major divisions within your document, and clicking on “source” for that division brings up just the HTML for that division. Finally, mousing over tags in the source view shows you what styles currently apply to that tag, and where in the CSS file the styles are located.  Read more...

Disclaimer: this piece (as well as this blog in general) is personal opinion and not endorsed by or representative of my employer.

I just came back from a conference where I was presenting on Web 2.0. A related discussion around Microsoft’s foray into the Rich Internet Application space ensued, and as part of that discussion, I was sent a link to an interesting Information Week article that talks directly to our discussion. The article talks about MS and Eclipse-based development environments for web applications, and one quote in the article demonstrated one of my major concerns perfectly:  Read more...