Begin forwarded message:
From: Eric Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue Oct 7, 2003 10:12:08 AM US/Pacific Subject: Re: Apple & Microsoft: Active Web Content
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/disclaimer.asp>Apple and Microsoft both have published information about the upcoming Internet Explorer changes, concerning ActiveX controls and Patent Nr. 5,838,906:
Why are they doing this?
I guess it's a security "feature", but it seems that the current content will just offer either a terrible experience to the user or some rework will be needed from the content developer.
I personally like the dialogue box that reads: Press OK to continue loading the content of this page" and then offers a single "OK" button.
Or this other really soothing and meaningful message: "Some Active Content on this site has been blocked. Click here to refresh and enable."
BTW, this change not only affects content in the <object> tag, but also <applet> and <embed> which may be in use for Java based content and Netscape style plug ins.
Yes it does, the new version of IE will display a confirmation dialog every time it encounters an OBJECT, EMBED, or APPLET tag that specifies a source of data external to the current web page. For QuickTime developers, this means it displays a prompt whenever a QuickTime OBJECT or EMBED tag has a "SRC" param with a url to a file on a server.
The simplest and most compatible way to avoid this new behavior is to change pages so that OBJECT and EMBED tags are not in a page at the time that IE downloads it, but rather are generated on the fly with JavaScript. The page we have posted at http://developer.apple.com/internet/ieembedprep.html describes two different ways to do this, one more suitable for sites that do not have many pages with embedded content, and another for pages with many pages with embedded content.
The later technique involves including an external JavaScript file that we have written in a page <head>, and calling a function in that file with all of the tags that were in the OBJECT and/or EMBED tags. This function then generates properly formed OBJECT and EMBED tags at runtime and IE does not display the prompt.
For example, the following tags in a page today:
<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0";
width="320" height="256" align="middle">
<param name="src" value="sample.mov" >
<param name="autoplay" value="true" >
<param name="bgcolor" value="black">
<embed src="sample.mov" autoplay="true" width="320" height="256"
align="middle" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"; >
</embed>
</object>
would be replaced with:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> QT_WriteOBJECT('sample.mov', '320', '256', '', 'autoplay', 'true', 'bgcolor', 'black', 'align', 'middle'); </script>
and would generate the following at runtime:
<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
width="320" height="256"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0";
align="middle" >
<param name="src" value="sample.mov">
<param name="autoplay" value="true" >
<param name="bgcolor" value="black">
<embed src="sample.mov" width="320" height="256"
pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/";
align="middle" autoplay="true" bgcolor="black" > </embed>
</object>
The JavaScript knows the correct values for classid, codebase, and pluginspage and will include them by default if they are not specified (as in the example above). The functions allow you to specify different tags and/or values for the EMBED and OBJECT if that is important. http://developer.apple.com/internet/ieembedprep.html has a complete description and a link to the external JavaScript file.
We realize that it will be a lot of work to change every page with embedded QuickTime content on a large site, so we have been working on a tool to help automate the process. This tool is run on an offline copy of a site and will identify and optionally attempt to fix (using the above technique) every page with embedded content that would cause the new version of IE to prompt. This tool has been developed in collaboration a number of companies that have browser plug-ins, so it knows how to identify and fix different types of embedded content.
We are almost ready to seed a beta version of the tool. Anyone that would like to be included in this seed should contact me directly for further information.
Microsoft has said that they will not ship a version of IE with the new behavior until some time in 2004 so there should be plenty of time to change pages so your customers will never see the confirmation dialog.
Eric Carlson
QuickTime Engineering
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