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Beanstock, many examples of their sites
perform better after they were brought into compliance with W3C
standards After reading the above
mentioned article I decided to do some light housekeeping on our own
website http://www.ValorCrossMedia.com. It was time to dust off the
cobwebs and bring it up to W3C compliance standards to enhance SERP
performance.
Valor Cross Media specializes in
Creative Web Services such as Online Advertising, Search Engine
Optimization, Marketing and Flash Video presentations for the web so
SERP performance is a top priority for our business.
To my surprise it was easier said than
done. I could not validate our home page for hours.
‘HAH!’ I thought. ‘I have 15+ years of
design experience, 10 exclusively online, so I should be able to do
this. After all, it is only cleaning up the markup, changing some
attributes, right?’
It was back to the drawing board and a
few hours on Google doing research.
I finally came up with an article
titled “Flash Satay: Embedding Macromedia Flash While Supporting
Standards.” on Macromedia.com
“Flash Satay’s” author Drew McLellan,
in an article originally published in “A List Apart" writes, "embed" is
not part of the XHTML specification and will prevent your page from
validating. It is used by Netscape and similar browsers for displaying
Flash movies. Parameters are passed within the element as name/value
attribute pairs."
McLellan goes on to say, “Netscape
created the "embed" tag as a way to embed plug-ins and players in web
pages. The "embed" tag is not part of the XHTML specification, and
although some browsers other than Netscape do support it, it’s not
compliant with the standards, so you shouldn’t use it.”
‘O.K,’ I thought, ‘So there are some
obstacles, but we’re getting closer to solving the problem. Our home
page contains an embedded Macromedia Flash movie. The solution is to
clean the markup and change some attributes.’
In a follow up to the Flash Satay
article McLellan also states:“Flash has built in security measures which
make life really tough. If the Flash player thinks the movie is being
loaded from a different domain to that of the page in which it is
embedded, it gives up and does nothing. It would also seem that it’s
very easy to confuse the Flash player into thinking that this is the
case. Flasher, beware!”
Hours later after cleaning up the
markup and changing attributes, I thought my page was finally ready to
be validated for W3C compliance. I found it worked fine in Netscape and
Mozilla but when I tried it in Internet Explorer (IE) it stopped dead in
its tracks.
Was it a security measure in the Flash
Player that stopped the movie or the Internet Explorer setting up rules
of their own?
All of a sudden memories of Netscape
vs. IE back in the early 90s, when I started out as a web designer,
flashed through my mind. Remember how CSS was only viewable in IE back
then?
I decided that until the browsers,
Macromedia and Microsoft, decide to play together I had better find a
creative solution to get the job done.
I dusted off an old browser detection
and redirection script found on NetMechanic.com that simply detects the
browser and redirects your page. The script is useful when you modify it
to redirect users to a page optimized for their particular browsers.
While you’ll have to spend time optimizing your individual pages for
different browsers, the script itself is very easy.
Finally, I created two separate pages;
one optimized for IE, which is validated with the W3C seal for CSS and a
second page optimized for browsers like Netscape, Mozilla, etc. to be
validated for the XHTML specifications which they support. The java
script detects the browser and redirects to an appropriate page. To see
an example of this, try opening www.ValorCrossMedia.com in Mozilla
browser and then try it in IE. You will see the difference in the seal
underneath the Flash movie, though the pages remain the same.
The best part is they are both W3C
compliant.
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