by Saurabh
28. April 2006 17:11
Following the changes related to Internet Explorer and the Eolas Technologies and the Regents of the University of California v. Microsoft patent case (Eolas v. Microsoft), Microsoft released an optional update to Internet Explorer 6 on February 28th 2006, which made somewhat of a modest change to the behavior of how pages with ActiveX are rendered. This change was visible even in the Beta2 preview (MIX 06) build of Internet Explorer 7 and the widely available Beta2 released this week. However if it's permanent in the case of IE 7 remains to be seen. I hope the IE team makes changes to their handling of ActiveX before they release it later this year.
Once the update is applied users cannot directly interact with Microsoft ActiveX controls loaded by the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements. Users can interact with such controls after activating their user interfaces. To activate an interactive control, either click it or use the TAB key to set focus on it and then press the SPACEBAR or the ENTER key. The most visible/annoying change is that it prevents Flash objects from receiving mouse & keyboard messages. Obviously this makes many flash objects loose their value as many respond to hover event of the mouse.
And although Microsoft promised to give developers an extra two months to modify their pages to ensure a smooth transition.But since the touted update; scheduled to be made critical in June, is only a month away. I guess why not share a simple workaround that I recently used myself, courtesy Amara Software.
You need to create a JavaScript file with the following code in it:
1: theObjects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
2: for (var i = 0; i < theObjects.length; i++)
3: {
4: theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML;
5: }
Now, include the file just below the last <object> in your HTML page.
e.g. Say you had saved the file as ieupdate.js
1: <script type="text/javascript" src="ieupdate.js"></script>
I know that xHTML purists will say that the page will fail XHTML validation. For such people the solution is SWFObject.
To read more about this issue and see other solutions available, please visit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html