RE: Macromedia Flash Ads

The requirements for a sensible replacement, as developed by a task force
including many manufacturers, me when I worked for WAI, and various others,
are at http://www.w3.org/TR/CX

There aren't "standards" - the closest thing is the Netscape plugin API which
is known to be limited. There will be more documentation available at
Mozilla.org on how they do it now, and there may be information for each
operating system (Apple OS X seems to have a fairly standard system).

IE introduced some features with the object element in HTML 4, such as
"codebase" which is a reference to the code that has to be run for a
particular object (i.e. the plugin identity) - if you find examples of the
object element on their site you will probably see what it looks like, or you
can read the definition in the HTML specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#edef-OBJECT (this approach
was explicitly rejected, in part because for accessibility one needs the
possiblity to use a different plugin for a given type of content).

cheers

Chaals

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Geoff Deering wrote:

>Could you or anyone else please send me any links to the standards for
>browser plugin APIs so I can see this for myself.
>
>I am also interested to find detailed documentation on the standards
>browsers are based on (maybe I should be asking this on the WAI-UA list.
>Why I ask this is because I am working on the document for promoting server
>side accessibility techniques, and I remember way back in the mid 90's
>reading that if redirects were implemented properly using "permanent" then
>the browser was meant to update bookmarks with the new URL.  I know no one
>even did, but I need this documentation to really track how browsers are
>going addressing these issues and the general state of this area.
>
>Geoff
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Charles McCathieNevile
>
>I believe that Macromedia (and Adobe, who have a similar problem with SVG)
>are waiting for browser manufacturers to improve the plugin API so they can
>do this. The problem is that there is no standard way of plugging
>browser-type objects together. There was some effort to address this at W3C
>through the component extension taskforce. The principle is that "plugins"
>should be able to have other plugins. This is particularly valuable as an
>approach for accessibility - rather than the model in IE where you specify
>the plugin to handle some media object, you could specify the type of media
>objecct and people coul use the plugin they prefer - you could have an HTML
>plugin running inside flash, with a mathML plugin running inside that, if
>that was how the content appeared.
>
>In the meantime people occasionally implement the functionality within flash
>or SVG but it is still the same as the mess at the browser level.
>
>And on a Mac almost every browser is tabbed, and you can plugin and use a
>three-button mouse (under X you can actually copy and paste with the mouse
>alone using left and midle buttons). Otherwise alt-click (for middle) or
>ctrl-click (for right) are the normal method.
>
>cheers
>
>Chaals
>
>On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Geoff Deering wrote:
>
>
>
>

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Sunday, 21 September 2003 14:28:55 UTC