Eolas Patent Workarounds

8 October 2003

Right at the bottom of this document. Microsoft suggests a solution work working around the “Press OK to continue loading the content of this page” dialog by using document.write in a linked JavaScript file to write the markup to the page. They even give an example of use.

I particularly like this bit:

The OBJECT element for an ActiveX control has a new attribute: NOEXTERNALDATA.

erm, sorry, but no it doesn’t.

Anyway, keen to trying and find a useful solution for embedding Flash nicely without invalidating the page at all, I downloaded the new version of IE and set to work. Hmm … as far as I can tell so far, Microsoft’s document.write method simply doesn’t work. Has anyone else managed to get it working? I always get the alert, no matter what.

I’ll keep working on this later today, but if anyone has any comments I’d be pleased to hear them. Why won’t it work?

- Drew McLellan

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§ Nathan Pitman: The Macromedia workaround (Which is the same thing surely?) works for me...
§ Drew: Hmm .. I must be doing something wrong somewhere. I’ll post some examples later on.
§ Harold: The external javascript for QuickTime content that’s on Apple’s Developers site works for me. (I used ’External JavaScript Solution Two: For Multiple Occurrences of Embedded Content’.) It even works with postermovies. I’ve put up a sample here:

embed with postermovie sample

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About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

All in the <head>