[TYPO3-dev] Make the MULTIMEDIA Object standards compliant

[Sebastian Gebhard]

I find it quite dissatisfying that the MULTIMEDIA object currently uses 
an <embed> Tag for Flash movies, which is not standard compliant because 
embed is and was never not part of any (X)HTML specification.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic I recomment reading:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay (Nov. 2002!)
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashembedcagematch (Feb. 2007)

To put it in a nutshell there are the following options to embed a Flash 
movie standards compliant:

Directly:
============================
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="movie.swf" 
width="400" height="300">
	<param name="movie" value="movie.swf" />
</object>

Problem: IE does not support streaming when using this markup. This can 
be a problem for larger videos.


Using a Flash-Container (Satay Method):
=======================================
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="c.swf?path=movie.swf" 
width="400" height="300">
	<param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=movie.swf" />
</object>

Instead of referencing the target file directly a small flash file is 
called, which again loads the target file.
This workaround enabled Streaming for IE.

swfobject (JS-Libary)
=====================
No directly HTML-Markup for the Flash is needed. Instead only the 
fallback content has to be marked up (useful for search engines, 
screenreaders and users without (proper) flash plugin).
A line JS does the trick:
swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "flashContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0");
<div id="flashContent"> will be replaced with a flash movie which works 
cross browser.

It would be cool if we could implement one or more of these options into 
MULTIMEDIA object and make in configurable so that people can use 
MULTIMEDIA on standards compliant websites.

Or at least add a hook to MULTIMEDIA so that an Extension can make it 
use swfobject, for example.

What do you think?

Kind regards,
Sebastian