The IE Changes Explained (FREE) Support

This free article is a must-read for all web designers who use any kind of active content (Flash, QuickTime etc) on their sites. Bruce Lawson investigates the changes that you'll need to make as suggested by Microsoft, Macromedia, Real Networks and Apple if you plan to continue delivering seamless Flash or other plug-in content to the 90% of the world who use IE.

Note March 5th 2004: Good news indeed. The proposed changes to Internet Explorer to force the dialog of doom every time rich content is required have been indefinitely shelved by Microsoft.

Update 9 March: The US Patent Office has revoked Eolas' patent, but Eolas is appealing.

Tools to help

So, it looks pretty straightforward, doesn't it? The fixes aren't particularly difficult to implement, whether you choose to use the new NOEXTERNALDATA  attribute to the <object> tag, or the JavaScript approach. The complexity, of course, is that every <object> tag on every page of every site needs to change. Nice. However, there are some tools being developed to help search for items that need to be changed, and help you change them. Macromedia are developing some utilities, but which aren't released yet. See http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/solution_summary.html for details of what they're developing.

If you're going down the replace-html-with-javascript-route, Accessify have a useful script where you can paste in the html, press a button and BANG! out pops your JavaScript (see resource box at the bottom of this article).

There's a utility that uses a slightly different, but still working solution made by Mario Klingemann at http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000314.php (the site was working when I was researching this article, but seems to give an error message today; overloaded with traffic, perhaps?)

Don't Go Changing, Just Tryin' To Please Me

Before you race to make the changes, consider that Microsoft are appealing the judgement of the patent case, on a prior art basis - see http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39117017,00.htm. And, (caveat: I am not a lawyer) there's no guarantee that the currently developed changes to IE will satisfy Eolas, anyway. I'm surprised that there's no 'cancel' button on the dialogue box of doom - maybe Doyle could argue that, because the user can't cancel the loading of active content, it is still being 'automatically launched' by the browser.

However, I'm certain that Microsoft have one or two good lawyers working with them, and  given the laborious appeals process which could take years, I'm going to start looking at my sites now: only this morning (9 October), Eolas applied for an injunction to stop Microsoft distributing IE, so we could see an earlier release of the new version, maybe. (See http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5088349.html)

The Bad news

The news is bad for the Web, bad for your clients and bad for you.

Bad for the Web:

• It would be very understandable if, instead of hacking around with JavaScript, people use the IE-only NoExternalData attribute to the <object> tag . After all, it's only IE that's affected, right? Currently, that is true. But then, Mr Doyle might find that $500million is not enough and go after another browser manufacturer. There's no guarantee that they will dream up a solution that has exactly the same attribute as IE. Also, it's disappointing now that people are really starting to embrace Web Standards and validating their pages, because this IE-only tag will not validate. Let's hope that the W3C include it in a revised version of HTML4.01 and XHTML double-quick so that the validators can be rewritten.

• JavaScript is turned off by about 10% of all users. You need to embed your content using the <object> tag in the <noscript> tag so that they can at least be offered the content if they're not running JavaScript. Yes, they'll get the dialog box of doom, but that's better than a broken link - and much better than a lawsuit against you because you're denying screen-reader users the active content that you offer to others with JavaScript. There's enough law-suits at the moment, right?

• The last thing we want is people using unchanged sites/ dormant sites that are not actively maintained getting used to blindly clicking 'OK' on the dialog of doom. How long before some enterprising virus/ Trojan writer uses an identical dialog box to deliver a malicious program straight to a users' hard-drive, safely assuming that people just click 'OK' on this dialog box automatically? I give it 10 days after the release of IE before we start seeing such trickery.

Bad For Your Clients:

Because they're paying for you to change every call to active content, and test it - or risk alienating their users with the dialog box of doom. If you want to see how annoying it's going to be for users, download the beta version of the new IE and test some sites today...