I have been all over the web looking for a good solution that will display a flash movie in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Most of what I have seen are bloated hacks and workarounds. If we just take a look at the XHTML standards set forth by ther W3C, the answer can be found.

Even though there are many attributes that are considered acceptable by the standards, too many designers are over-complicating the problem at hand. Here is an example of a streamlined object tag that works as expected in most modern browsers.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://www.domain.com/flashmovie.swf" width="200" height="150">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.domain.com/flashmovie.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="name=value" />
</object>

This is all you really need and the code adheres to the XHTML Strict Doctype 🙂

Note: IE will still need the “movie” parameter and the other parameters are just provided to ensure optimal appearance.