rocknbil - 3:29 am on Jun 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

It seems really strange that the best page designer software would have a problem inserting flash movies.

Well, "best" is all relative, those of us that hand code would consider Notepad among the best and Dreamweaver/Front Page/etc. an annoyance. :-)

The problem with Adobe's publish methods are actually legacy issues carried over from as early as Netscape 2.0 days, when it was still called ShockWave. The object element was not well supported by Mozilla for Flash, so we needed embed, which was not supported by IE for Flash. The result was to nest embed inside object . . . which is invalid HTML.

As things progressed (for the worse, IMO) they began automating Javascript to handle various browser issues. The result was a bloated code that worked most of the time, but one little thing is out of place and it falls like a house of cards.

IMO this still exists with AS3, which is very advanced OOP programming. It is really good programming but like many advanced techniques, relies on an understanding of class files and dependencies, all of which must be "included" when uploading a simple .swf. I like to keep it simple: one file, unless I'm dynamically importing data. This frees me up from using library objects, such as the video players, etc., that come packaged with Flash (or can be downloaded and included in a project.)

I'm not placing the entire blame on MM/Adobe developers, if you've ever written a CMS you'd understand the myriad of twists and turns you must take to manage all possible conditions and account for all possible user errors. It's just that when published using a WYSIWYG program, things are bound to go sideways sooner or later.

You can see by the previous example when you understand what's "under the hood" life can be a lot more simple. If you get it to work, you can still work in DW, just open that code window to make alts for your SWF includes . . . and all should be golden.

That is, if my sample works. :-)