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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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