夜的第七章

Microsoft's recent decision to change the way ActiveX objects are handled in Internet Explorer, following the patent law suit by EOLAS, has created a serious problem for the developer community.

All ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer -- including Flash and Shockwave -- will need to be activated by a mouse click (or by hitting Tab and the Enter key) before the user can interact with the control. This is bound to impair the user experience of any web site that embeds Flash, and it's up to the Flash and HTML developers to clean up the mess.

Available Solutions

You can bypass the activation requirement by using an externally linked script, such as JavaScript, to embed the ActiveX content. Solutions are currently available for Flash, such as FlashObject and UFO.

These work well for embedding new Flash content using JavaScript. But what about existing object tags, which will need to be rewritten, or browsers with JavaScript disabled? These situations require an alternative solution.

ObjectSwap

The ObjectSwap solution presented in this article takes all these issues into account. It captures all existing object tags and replaces them with ... themselves. This forces an automatic activation in Internet Explorer, while leaving other browsers alone. Similar solutions have been developed in parallel, but this article will concern itself only with ObjectSwap.