by James Crowe
26. April 2008 10:16
Using flash movies in a website is a great way to enhance a user’s experience, deliver content and interact with the user. However there have always been concerns regarding the ability to implement flash whilst remaining SEO friendly and W3C compliant. Below are some of the practices I’ve implemented to overcome these concerns.
Make flash file content indexeable
A feature added to Flash 8 was to allow meta data to be embedded in swf files making them easily indexeable. You can add a title and description to the flash file by selecting Modify > Document. This text can be read by most search engines and screen readers. The description should be relevant to the flash file’s purpose rather than describing the file.
Provide alternative content to the flash file
Flash version penetration is extremely high, however there are a still some users out there that either don’t have flash or are restricted to their version for one reason or other. Along with the associated SEO and Accessibility benefits it therefore makes sense provide some alternative content for these. These could take the form of:
- Images (with alt,title content)
- Text describing the intended message
- Combination of both
Using valid mark-up
Mark-up methods include:
- Adobe’s default mark-up provided to embed flash files is the most flash compatible method, however it uses invalid ‘embed’ tags which aren’t recognised in html and xhtml standards.
- Abode flash development tool kit, isn’t valid mark-up, complex to use, uses inline javascript and combines VBScript and Javascript.
- Another method is the Satay method, it’s valid mark-up but doesn’t cope particuarly well with updating flash versions, non-flash users or large flash files. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay
My preferred method is using SWFObject, benefits include:
Detects flash version
Provides valid markup
Offers functionality to revert back to non flash content (if appropriate flash player isn't installed)
For more details about SWFObject visit the Google code site: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
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Tags:
Flash
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