Working on Eolas Fix

I’ve been spending some of my time this week working on changing the fundamentals of our Web sites to comply with the new changes to Internet Explorer. I’m referring to the changes where Shockwave and Flash content now play differently. Thanks to a ridiculous patent cliam by a company named Eolas, ActiveX controls now must be clicked on to activate before they can run. So all of our games simply sit there and wait for a single click before doing anything.
One way around this unnecessary behavior is to use a JavaScript embed call and place the OBJECT tag in document.write code. That’s what I’m doing. Other methods use AJAX functions which I hear are even more of a pain.
All is well on our test machines, but I am getting some complaints from users. I suspect that some have JavaScript turned off. A NOSCRIPT tag takes care of that. Others may be having trouble unrelated to my changes, but related to other changes in Internet Explorer. One complained that “medium” security settings resulted in Shockwave not being able to play. I think it will be a while before I figure this all out, but when I do, I plan on posting an article to Director Online about it.