Re: automatic redirection to flash page

> "What I am looking to set up is that when you go to www.somesite.org (not
> the real URL), the script will not ask you to download the browser, it will

Firstly, what does the Flash page do.  Most Flash pages don't do anything
useful, but if this page does, that might have to be factored in.

> automatically take you to the non-flash homepage. If it detects the
> plug-in, it takes you to the flash version."

You shouldn't assume scripts.  The non-Flash page should be either
the whole of the visible default page, or the <noscript> part of it.
(Note that you shouldn't use Refresh for redirection, either.)

You may want to investigate whether the common browsers indicate Flash
in their Accept headers.  If they do, the correct solution may be to
return a server side redirect to the appropriate page.  (My suspicion
is that Accept is patchily implemented, although browsers do seem to 
indicate PNG support this way, as the W3C web pages use it to choose an 
appropriate log image.)

Actually, I think the really correct way of doing this would be to
use object, with the non-Flash page as the fallback content.  However,
I think you may find that people get prompted to download the plugin
before the browser is prepared to fallback (I seem to remember that
I get two or three popup warnings when I get a page that tries to
use Flash).

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2001 17:31:09 UTC