I've worked with Flash for several years and have always been slightly dissatisfied with the markup needed to embed a movie in web pages. When I recently published a site in XHTML, my dissatisfaction with the markup grew as I realized that it simply wasn't valid in this context and was bloating my pages to unacceptable levels. A leaner, standards-compliant method of embedding Flash movies was called for.

The Twice-Cooked Method

Flash has always shipped with some method of generating an HTML page to contain Flash movies. Initially, it was a tool called AfterShock. Since the release of Flash 4, authors can export HTML pages with embedded movies from within the Flash...

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It's hard to identify an art movement while it's in progress. Like the ups and downs of the stock market, the defining elements of a movement may not become clear until you come out on the other side of the boom or bust. Even so, the Flash aesthetic has developed enough to be identified and examined.

Many of the common elements of Flash design have evolved because Flash facilitates certain aspects of animation, while making other aspects more difficult. The Flash aesthetic is born when techniques developed to deal with Flash's strengths and limitations are carried over into other media.

The majority of any art is developed by not beginners learning the form, nor...

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As broadband Internet connections become more ubiquitous, and more corporate sites begin to incorporate Flash and use it as their primary tool, there will be more of a need to incorporate e-commerce functionality into the Flash-based websites that you design. For the moment, this is uncommon, and I can propose two reasons why: • Most e-commerce developers have experience creating HTML-based sites, and the current crop of development tools (i.e. ASP, PHP, JSP, Cold Fusion) are specifically designed to spit out HTML pages. • Many people still use dial-up modems. So, to provide easy, quick access to the largest number of customers possible, simple HTML sites are almost always the way to go....

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Macromedia released Flash MX in mid-March of 2002, including enhancements to the player and the authoring tool to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Admittedly, some areas like screen reader access couldn't possibly get any worse than they were in previous versions of the player: popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes ignored Flash content completely. Other features, such as the ability to add captions (which has been available since Flash 5), benefit from improvements Macromedia made to the Flash architecture in this release.

The changes have also automatically improved access to existing Flash content when viewed in the Flash Player 6, but to...

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In " Flash Access: Unclear on the Concept," I dissected Macromedia's plans for making Flash accessible to people with disabilities. At the time, Macromedia had ignored accessibility completely. Once it had belatedly committed to solving the problem, the company did not know just what it was getting into.

People keep telling me to stop being such a bitch, so here is a much cheerier and less disempowering update. Macromedia no longer ignores accessibility and does know what it's getting into, but only the very earliest steps have been taken.

The screen reader problem

The new Flash MX authoring environment and the equally new...

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In Christian theology, it doesn't matter exactly when you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. As long as you do it before you croak and ask forgiveness for your sins, you're in like Flynn.

This, apparently, is the Macromedia philosophy when it comes to accessibility.

The company's flagship product, Flash, is intrinsically inaccessible to anyone who cannot see properly and is very often inaccessible to a deaf or hard-of-hearing person. It's also completely inaccessible on slow computers or any machine that lacks the Flash plug-in, rendering those viewers more functionally disabled than they actually are.

Macromedia has, however, undergone a kind...

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In Part One of this game-building tutorial, we created a hero ship and a bullet and programmed the two to work in tandem. The ship can be steered via the arrow keys, and the space bar launches the bullet from the ship's location.

Now it's time to start turning this experiment from a primitive environment simulator to a real game.

This game, like all others, involves conflict, rules, and the potential for loss as well as gain. Heroes alone make for boring games. We need a villain.

Rock show

Now we'll add a rock to the mix – yes, just one for now – and assign it the following script: onClipEvent (enterFrame) { _x += deltax; _y +=...

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With Jim Heid

In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.

One of these is SMIL™, the W3C recommendation for multimedia; the other is SVG, intended to deliver vector graphics such as those already used in Flash (but with some essential differences from Flash).

When faced with SMIL, many web designers shrug; when shown what SVG can do today, most Flash designers laugh....

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On th' other side up rose BELIAL, in act more graceful and humane; A fairer person lost not Heav'n; he seemd For dignity compos'd and high exploit: But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the eare, And with persuasive accent thus began.

– John Milton, Paradise Lost

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am the cancer that has riddled the formerly healthy body of the Web.

I am the darkness that has spread forever across...

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This plugin enables you to use WYSIWYG editor easily and customzably in Movable Type. There are many available open WYSIWYG editors. I've used HTMLArea and FCKeditor. Both are very good, even though they give some loads to your PC. But as time goes by, this load could be trivial.

My alogblogMTinterface plugin uses many alternate templates. Therefore the users who use my alogblogMTinterface might have some troubles in personally adapting other WYSIWYG editors. Of course I also have the same trouble whenever new W~G editors or its MT plugins are released. So I decided to provide W~G in it independently.

One of the powerful features of FCKeditor is the Media...

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With Ryan Holsten and Michael Krisher

The year 2000 came and went. Where did design go? As sad as it sounds, not terribly far. It was a year of trendiness, inspiration, imitation, and the imitation of inspired trendiness. What we can take away from the past year in digital design is the knowledge that the new medium is still deep in its early discovery phase.

Y2K (for lack of a shorter term) was going to change everything. Flying cars, artificial intelligence, talking toasters – this was our supposed fate. So where's our Jetsons lifestyle? Maybe Y3K would have been a more practical projection!

It's 11 p.m. Does your Mom know where you are?

The web is now recognized as...

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Alright you Nielsenites you, that didn't go quite like I expected. It's probably my fault for calling it ‘Best Practices' in the first place - what we're looking to create is more a crib sheet of practical advice, something for reference when a designer gets stuck while using CSS specifically.

"A lot of these ‘best practices' are just arbitary favouritism for a particular way of working." - jgraham

I'd tend to agree. While nobody wants a blue, underlined link world, and we'll be debating for ages the best way to size fonts, this is what I was getting at: "a CSS Best Practice is a one sentence action...

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If the design of this site looks relatively coherent, congratulations! Your browser does a good-to-excellent job of supporting web standards like CSS-1, HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0, and scripting languages. If this site is readable and usable but looks as plain as an Amish coat, your browser does not support web standards. Fortunately, you can easily upgrade to one that does. Before you start shrieking, perhaps you'll hear us out.

What have you done?

We've upgraded the design of A List Apart to comply with web standards, some of which (like CSS1) date back to 1996. This, of course, is the year 2001.

Why doesn't it work in old browsers?

They were not built to comply...

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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible...

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This week, Microsoft released IE5 Macintosh Edition, the first shipping web browser to meaningfully support two key standards: HTML 4, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1. This is good news whether you use a Mac or not, because the browser not only empowers webmakers to begin building standards-compliant sites, it also cures headaches caused by trying to support Mac-based visitors.

Equally noteworthy is what's missing from IE5/Mac: meaningful support for XML and the DOM. On that level, IE5/Mac is just like IE5 for Windows: not good enough. Then again, no shipping browser is good enough, because no browser truly supports these standards, one of which has been...

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As you've probably seen, either through rumors in the blogosphere, in the FAQ linked on our company homepage, or in Mena's account on Mena's Corner, we (Six Apart) have acquired LiveJournal. A lot of the details are covered in those links, but there's some information that might be of specific interest to the Professional Network community:

(Re-)Introducing LiveJournal

Most of you are probably familiar with LiveJournal, but it might be worth reviewing what it is and how it works for those of you who haven't had a chance to take a look. As you might know, LiveJournal is a hosted journal service that's similar to TypePad in some ways. However, LiveJournal is strongly focused on community,...

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Designed to fully comply with five key web standards (HTML 4, CSS-1, XML, JavaScript/EcmaScript, and the W3C DOM), Gecko was developed by the open-source Mozilla group over a period of nearly two years. During that same time period, Microsoft unleashed its Internet Explorer 5 browser for Windows.

IE5 failed to fully comply with key web standards (notably XML and the DOM). In fact, IE5 "extended" these technologies in suspect ways, while failing to fully support the standards that were already on the table. Nevertheless, Microsoft's browser rapidly eroded Netscape's market share, due to the dominance of the Windows platform, the strength of...

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Mike Davidson has just announced the release of sIFR 2.0. This popular combination of slick javascript and smart use of Flash lets you choose custom fonts to display headlines on a website, for situations where the presentation of your page makes these considerations important. You can see an older version of sIFR in action on sixapart.com, and the new release improves the way the technique behaves when people have disabled or blocked Flash, while still providing very accessible content on your page.

As an added bonus, if you use the technique on any web page that displays comments, you can get a free debate about the relative merits of Flash, HTML, CSS and other presentation and...

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Sooner or later, you may be called upon to create or maintain an internal website. If you work for a major corporation, or are contracted at one (as I am), internal sites may comprise the bulk of your work.

Don't be afraid of internal sites. In many respects, they are very similar to external sites. There are two main differences though. • Internal sites tend to be much larger. • They're geared toward employees, not the great unwashed masses.

Let's say you work for Fergus & McFungus Associates, a major corporation that produces lots of useless things that people just can't get enough of. The CEO, Angus McFungus, approaches you in his usual...

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