[ FYI: This thread was started as a response to another conversation, in the "What's The Perfect Vlogging Software?" thread. This means that the new topic will be invisible to those whose emailer follows threading conventions, and made the archive misthreaded too: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/message/39116 Hitting "New" for new conversations and pasting in the Yahoo Groups mailing address is cleaner than hitting "Reply" to start a new discussion, thanks in advance. ]
Nathan Miller asked for help in understanding this incoming message:: >> Hey Nathan, do you realise you’ve got ActiveX employed >> on your Web site? It’s causing these really annoying >> pop-up messages to appear in my browser every time I >> access your page. I use IE 6. Can you do something >> about this? Not knowing the literal alert the person saw makes it hard for any of us to be definitive. If this person is using Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, then they are by definition using ActiveX Controls to render some of their content. I visited your site in Firefox/WinXP, and also saw alerts. I have an older version of QuickTime installed, but did not have the codecs necessary to view that QT content. Here's what's going on: When someone visits your video page in a plugin-using browser (Mozilla, Safari, Opera, others) then the server identifies the media type of this extended content via the MIME type abbreviations. The browser then checks which plugins it has that can display this video type, invokes the plugin, and displays the content. In Microsoft's Window browser, the OBJECT tag identifies the ActiveX Control which the designer wants to use (via the CLSID), and identifies any minimum version (via the CODEBASE argument). In both cases, the browser will throw up an alert if the plugin or control is not installed. IE/Win will also do a version check, and will also do a background-download of the necessary Control. Some plugins (such as QuickTime, I believe) will also throw up their own alert if the renderer is too old to render more modern content. Bottom line: If your visitor's browser cannot yet render your content, they will see an alert, and the browser will try to guide them to an updated browser extension, in either Netscape Plugin or ActiveX wrapper. What to do? This person will be seeing lots of similar alerts in IE/Win... it's not solely your responsibility. Your *site* doesn't use ActiveX so much as his *browser* uses ActiveX, and your site tries to accommodate their choice. How to minimize? This is self-serving of me, admitted, but it's easiest to use video in the Adobe Flash video architecture. More people have this browser extension than any other, and more people have the current version than have the current versions of any other WWW technology. This will not eliminate all browser-incapability alerts, but will reduce them greatly... in its first three months over 50% of consumers tested had already updated to Flash Player 8, so the odds are much better that your audience will not see any update alerts. Sorry I took so long, but I hope the above background helps figure out what they're objecting to. (And like other folks in this thread, I don't see any connection to the "Eolas" behavior change in IE/Win... only commonality seems to be the word "ActiveX" in the title.) jd -- John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/ Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
