Shockwave Object Fix – Javascript

If you have ever been on a website that when you moused over a flash animation or shockwave object you get a mouseover that says “Click to Activate and use this control”.  This is a result of litigation that was won over Microsoft so they were forced to change their Internet Explorer web browser, it kind of caused an uproar across the development community, not that it disables anything really, just causes site visitors to click on an object before they interact with it.

We do a few sites with Flash on them, usually try to steer clear of Flash because it’s not search engine friendly and a little bit more time consuming to update therefore relaying higher costs onto our clients, but we do develop graphics and applications in flash if our clients request them.

In order to workaround the Object Activation thing in IE there is a way around it.  Here’s what you can do…

1. Open Notepad, Notepad++, or whatever text editor you like to use, simply go in and paste this code into a blank text file and save it as “shockwave-fix.js”

   1: theObjects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");

   2: for (var i = 0; i < theObjects.length; i++) {

   3: theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML;

   4: }

2. Next, open up your html page that you are running flash on and locate the last </object> tag in the document, you can do this quickly by using Control F and toggling down the page. Once you have located the bottom </object> close tag, simply drop in this javascript call:

   1: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/shockwave-fix.js">

I thought this was pretty useful info so I decided to post it here in case anyone else has been frustrated by this.  If you want to see how it works, you can go to: http://www.powersitedesign.com and check out my flash centerscreen that I have running there, it removes the object activation thing altogether.