Thursday, April 12, 2007

Flash object fails to call Javascript function

The most popular way to show video in web pages today is to play the video files inside flash players that are embedded inside the html page. Like everyone else we did it too and it works just fine.

A new feature that we added to our site is the ability to embed our flash player into any blog or site page, and for this purpose we also added a feature that sends information from the flash player to our server each time someone plays one of our videos somewhere out there. That way we can count how many views our videos get even outside the site.


When we added this view-counter feature we could not get it to work. The flash player did not reach the server page even though we wrote the calling code properly.


After looking at some professional blogs and sites we found out the problem: we use the name "5minPlayer" as our player tag name, and the Object tag that holds the flash player should not begin with a number...


There are other limitations to this object tag, and also many things you should know if you are going to use flash on your page, especially if you are implementing extensive interaction between flash and the html page. A great page on this issue can be found here.

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