Test page for the Explorer 6 update caused by the Eolas patent.
(By the way, I thought Eolas was one of those truly nasty African viruses that make you bleed to death from the inside out)
Study this page with the
IE Update. This update shows an alert whenever it encounters something
embedded by an object tag.
The alert is meant to break the 'seamless experience' of HTML and Flash object. Apparently, this is what the patent is all about. When you see an alert you don't experience seamlessness any more, you experience annoyance.
Microsoft proposed two other solutions: inserting an extra attribute or generating the object
through JavaScript.
Craig Saila offers an interesting solution:
var nObjs = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for(x=0;nObjs.length>x;x++){ nObjs[x].setAttribute("NOEXTERNALDATA","true"); }
Unfortunately it doesn't work because
onload since only at that time a complete list of all object
tags is available. Unfortunately the alert flashes as soon as the browser encounters an object tag in the
source code.This is a Flash movie. It generates an alert.
This Flash movie has the extra attribute noexternaldata=true. It doesn't generate an alert
but doesn't show the Flash movie either. You'll notice that the browser continues loading the Flash movie,
and continues, and continues... I haven't yet seen it finish the download.
Here I write a Flash movie into the page, as advised by Microsoft itself. If the script is in a separate .js file it doesn't generate an alert. If it's in the head of the page, though, it will generate an alert.
I love these ridiculous decisions.