The Problem:
Microsoft’s decision to change the way ActiveX objects are handled in Internet Explorer, following the patent law suit by EOLAS, has left the developer community in uproar. Soon all the ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer, among them Flash and Shockwave, will need to be activated by a click or a tab and an enter key before they can interact with the control. This is bound to impair the user experience of any website that embeds Flash – and there are many such sites out there - and make a good deal of trouble for the Flash developers, who are left to clean up the mess.
Available Solutions:
You can bypass the activation requirement by using an externally linked script, such as JavaScript, to embed the ActiveX content. There are currently available solutions for Flash, such as SWFObject and UFO. These work well for embedding new Flash content using JavaScript. But what about existing <object> tags, which will need to be rewritten, or browsers with disabled JavaScript? These would require an alternative solution.
ObjectSwap:
Neo-Archaic’s ObjectSwap solution (downloadable from www.neo-archaic.net/scripts/objectSwap.js) takes all these issues into account. It captures all existing <object> tags and replaces them with themselves. This forces an automatic activation in Internet Explorer, while leaving other browsers alone. Similar solutions have been developed in parallel, but this article will only concern itself with ObjectSwap. Although this solution was developed primarily with Flash in mind, it should also work with other ActiveX controls, such as Shockwave. The script affects all the <object> tags in the page, but the user can exclude specific objects by setting their class name to ”noswap”.