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Detecting Flash plug-in support
The Macromedia Flash plug-in provides a great way to liven up your web
site. With Flash you can make fancy splash screens, animated graphics,
interactive presentations, and much more. The downside? Not all of
your visitors will have the Flash plug-in installed, and therefore will not
experience your site as you'd expect. :(
While it's true that Internet Explorer will automatically attempt to download
and install the Flash player if not already installed, many people find this to
be highly intrusive. As a result, developers prefer only to serve Flash content
to Flash capable browsers. In addition, this automatic download isn't an
option for users of other popular browsers, such as Netscape Communicator.
By using the approach demonstrated here, however, you can have an alternative
plan up your sleeve, and be ready to serve non Flash folks with a suitable
alternative.
Let's assume you have a fancy Flash animation on your home page waiting to
dazzle your visitors, and that this animation requires the Flash 4 plug-in to be
installed. To make sure that visitors without Flash 4 will
not be left staring at a blank home page, you'll want to provide an alternative
such as an image where the Flash animation would normally go.
Here is a summary of the steps needed to implement this approach:
- detect whether their browser has the Flash 4 plug-in installed
- if they have Flash 4, send the HTML back to the browser which will
start the Flash movie playing
- if they do not have Flash 4, send the HTML back to the browser which
displays a standard image in its place - along with a tiny note that the site is
best used with a Flash capable browser.
The toughest part of this approach is determining whether the visitor has the
Flash 4 player installed in their browser. Fortunately BrowserHawk 2000
makes detecting Flash support as simple as calling a single method and checking
the Plugin_Flash property.
filename=/browserhawk/flashcheck.asp
<%
set bh = Server.CreateObject("cyScape.browserObj")
bh.GetExtProperties "BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF"
'Note: The above method must be called before the HTML tag.
'Pass in the background color used by your site as shown above
'for best results. See the BrowserHawk documentation for more
'details on using this method.
%>
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Flowers 'n Things Home Page (Demo)</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<CENTER><H3>Welcome to Flowers 'n Things!</H3></CENTER>
<%
flashVer = bh.Plugin_Flash
if flashVer >=4 then %>
<!-- Code for Flash 4 users goes here -->
<CENTER>
<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://active.macromedia.com/flash2/cabs/swflash.cab#version=4,0,0,0"
ID=Flower WIDTH=360 HEIGHT=360>
<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="Flower.swf"> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF> <embed src="Flower.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="360" HEIGHT="360" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">
</OBJECT><BR>
</CENTER>
<HR WIDTH=400>
<CENTER><TABLE WIDTH=400><TR><TD>
Lesson note: This is the page shown to all visitors with the Flash 4 plug-in or higher installed. If they
did not have Flash 4 installed, we would have presented <A HREF="flower.gif" WIDTH=360 HEIGHT=360>this image</A>
instead of the Flash animation above. This script uses cyScape's <A HREF="http://www.cyscape.com/products/">BrowserHawk</A> to determine whether Flash is installed.
</TD></TR></TABLE></CENTER>
<% else %>
<!-- Code for Non-Flash 4 users goes here -->
<CENTER><IMG SRC="flower.gif" WIDTH=360 HEIGHT=360></CENTER><BR>
<CENTER><FONT SIZE=-1>Best viewed with <A HREF="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">Macromedia Flash 4</A></FONT></CENTER>
<HR WIDTH=400>
<CENTER><TABLE WIDTH=400><TR><TD>
<%
msg = ""
if flashVer = 0 then
msg = "You do not have Flash installed."
elseif flashVer = -1 then
msg = "It is not possible with your browser/platform to detect whether your Flash is installed."
else
msg = "You have Flash version " & flashVer & " installed."
end if
%>
Lesson note: <% =msg%> This is the page shown to all visitors without the Flash 4 plug-in or higher installed. Since
their browser does not support Flash, we provide them with this alternative graphic for the home
page. This script uses cyScape's <A HREF="http://www.cyscape.com/products/">BrowserHawk</A> to determine whether Flash is installed.
</TD></TR></TABLE></CENTER>
<% end if %>
</BODY></HTML>
Need a copy of BrowserHawk? See our section on Getting Started.
Copyright (c) 2000 cyScape, Inc.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, distributed, or reprinted
without written consent from cyScape.
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