Flash Detection Script

This article has been superseded by this updated article!

While most of your users will have the Flash player, some may not. If you are concerned with users who may have older browsers or who don't have the Flash player, you may want to add some Flash Detection JavaScript into your page. You may customize the script so that it embeds different content in place of a Flash movie, such as a static graphic.

This script is a modification of the script from www.moock.org. You will need to be pretty comfortable with copying and editing in HTML view.

This goes into the HEAD area of your HTML:
(Click in the window and type Ctrl-A to select all. Then type Ctrl-C to copy. Then go to FrontPage, go to HTML view, and find the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. Paste (Ctrl-V) this code somewhere in between them.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1" type="text/javascript">  </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </SCRIPT>

This goes into the BODY area of your HTML, right by where your Flash movie is:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </SCRIPT>

Now comes the hard part. You will need to copy over the HTML for the Flash movie in between the single quotation marks here:

var oeTags = '<OBJECT...>';

You will want to have this be one long line in the HTML. Alternatively, you can split it up into different lines like this:

var oeTags = '<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" '
+ 'codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/..."'
+ 'WIDTH=600 HEIGHT=255><PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="intro.swf">'
+ '<PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high><PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF>'
+ '<EMBED src="intro.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF WIDTH=600 HEIGHT=255 '
+ 'TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash"'
+ 'PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/...">'
+ '</EMBED></OBJECT>';

Where the HTML code is in between single quotes, with plus signs "adding" them together (don't forget the semicolon at the very end).

Then, where you see:

var alternateContent = 'Your alternate content here' // height, width required!

+ 'Your alternate content here';//any desired alternate html code goes here

Replace the "Your alternate content here" with the HTML code for a static image or other content. (An easy way to do this is to have the static content on the page already, then go to the HTML and move the code into the quotes.) Once again, you may have as many lines as you want, with the single quotes and plus signs and the semicolon at the end.

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Flash Detection Script