transparent SWF cross-browser/platform probs

[spaghbol]

Hi all,

I'm using Flash 8 Professional on a Mac. I have 2 different swf's which i place into a side menu in dreamweaver, they have white stage backgrounds but I need them to be transparent. I have read every possible thread about how to make your swf transparent and it seems like the answer is to use wmode="transparent" and another bit of code which i cant remember at the mo (lol). This works fine in Firefox on the Mac (makes a change....) but when tested in IE6 and IE7 the transparency tag seems to be ignored - the white stage appears.

Any idea how to get around this? I am unfortunately not able to give you the link to the site I am working on as it hasnt gone live yet. I would appreciate as quick a reply as possible, and I really hope it will be a solution rather than an agreement that the code doesnt work in IE (lol).

Thanks in advance,

Theo

[anonymous]

Have you set the wmode="transparent" both in the object & embed tags?

[spaghbol]

yes i have. I have even gone as far as publishing it as HTML format in flash and checking the source code, and copying the necessary code into my HTML, there is obviously something going wrong because IE does not seem to understand this code and the stage is not transparent.

Edit - the code used by flash when it makes the HTML and the code i use is the same.

[jsebrech]

If you directly include the object tag in the HTML you'll get the dreaded eolas click-to-activate problem which may affect rendering. Perhaps wmode will only work for object tags written out with document.write?

[CyanBlue]

If I remember correctly, wmode transparent does not work all across the browsers and should be avoided if your SWF needs to be playing on all the browsers...

[jsebrech]

Given the numerous ads that make use of it there must be a way to make useful use of it though. At least, that's what I would think intuitively.

[spaghbol]

I have managed to find a solution to this. I am not going to get pushed around by what the software I use wants me to do (looking at you dreamweaver and flash grrrr)....I need to use it in the way i want and it seems the way to do so is to publish in flash as a HTML, copy the source code starting with <object> into dreamweaver (replacing dreamweavers code starting with <object>) and wa-laaa, it works. Not only does it have wmode=transparent etc, it has something which dreamweaver doesnt, and I cant put my finger on it because I have commented out the bits of code one by one to try and work it out but I couldnt figure it out. Never mind, *I think* it's fixed.

Edit - in response to CyanBlue's post, if it should be avoided, then what is the solution (if the one I have found doesnt work properly?)

[beau]

I thought IE dropped the Mac after 5.

Transparency is actually (was actually) a bug in IE/PC that got exploited and then deemed a useful thing. Initially only IE/PC supported transparency, and then Firefox came along and that'll work on both platforms, but, as far as I know, that's the extent of it.

i.e., no transparency on Mac other than Firefox. I think I read that Safari supported transparency, but safari became so buggy that doing anything with this feature became a lost cause.

[jsebrech]

There are plenty of firefox users on the mac though. I'm one myself. I just don't like safari. It's slow (for me) and its UI is limiting and, frankly, uglier than firefox with the grapple theme.