Flash preventing my pages from validating?

Validator complains about embed and all attributes

[limitup]

I'm trying to validate my pages using 4.01 Transitional, and the W3C validator is complaining about anything related to my flash. It says there is no src attribute for embed, and also complains about every attribute I'm trying to use such as quality, bgcolor, loop, type etc.

It's also complaining any time I try to create a special character using something like • etc. It says ; is a non-SGML character. I'm using the iso-8859-1 charset.

Any tips for me on either of these? Thanks!

[tedster]

Macromedia has a reprint of the "Flash Satay" method on their site - it addresses how to put Flash on your page in a standards-compliant fashion.

[macromedia.com...]

[twist]

At the original post of this article which I can't post a link to here (apparently?),

(do a search for flash satay)

users are allowed to leave comments and there are 27 pages worth of comments with many pointing out potential flaws with the method. If I recall there would be certain scenerios where some people might not be able to view your flash using the satay method. Validating isn't worth losing visitors, IMO.

Another way that used to work for validating (and may still) is hiding the flash in javascript.

My final solution was just to keep flash on it's own pages and forget about validating altogether for those pages. Unless of course you are trying to use flash on every page which is also highly unrecommended.

[limitup]

Thanks for the info guys - I don't think I'll worry about it. It's just one of those things where this is one of the last few errors and at first I thought it be cool to have 0 errors. But it sounds like it's not worth worrying about.

I figured out the bullet problem - I was using the windows character when I should be using the UTF character code.

[tedster]

Sounds like a wise decision. If you leave a non-validating bit here or there, but you know it and you know why you left it, well, the world isn't perfect. There definitely are good reasons to allow some non-valid mark-up to stay.