Adobe and Webstandards

There's an article on Adobe/Macromedia's Developer's center about supporting Webstandards, exhorting us to develop with them. As far as I'm concerned they're preaching to the choir. However, I wonder if this means that the company will get behind Webstandards for their products. I'm looking at you ColdFusion.

Now, for the most part, it is very easy to write Webstandards based HTML/XHTML with ColdFusion. That is as long as you aren't using Flash Forms, or <cfchart>. Basically anything that embeds Flash uses the backward compatible Flash embedding, and <cfchart> even in .jpg or .png mode still creates image embedding code that isn't Webstandards compliant.

I understand the need to balance the ideal of Webstandards compliance against actually working with the browsers that people are actually using. But can't we have a boolean on those tags that embed content that developers can use to choose for themselves to support old browsers. Maybe we could even pass in a HTML/XHTML version to comply with.

Not that I don't love the work that the ColdFusion development team has done, but Adobe brought it up. And this isn't the first time I've said this: ColdFusion and Valid Code.

March 27, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 9:35 PM

ColdFusion, Web Development,

Comments

If you're asking why EMBED makes the W3C Validators cry, then that's because it's what the browsers support, and the spec countered it. Player doesn't care what label the browser uses to invoke it, just that it's invoked.

(Browsermakers are switching over to schemes to invoke the proper plugin via OBJECT tag, whether W3C-style OBJECT or MS-style OBJECT, but they're not quite there yet.)

Do what thou wilt... you want to use OBJECT instead of EMBED, go ahead. Just test your project carefully in a range of viewing environments first, please, I don't want you to get burned.

Posted by: John Dowdell at March 27, 2006 10:52 PM

whoops, that was a couple of pargraphs in there, guess linebreaks aren't always translated across blogging engines....

Posted by: John Dowdell at March 27, 2006 10:53 PM

Yeah parts of Movable type mystify me. It's set to honor line breaks.

As to your comment, I do embed using the object tag, when I have control over the embed. Unless I'm missing something, I have no control over how cfchart, or flash forms embed their content.

Posted by: Terrence Ryan at March 27, 2006 10:57 PM

Posted by Who at May 13, 2008 3:38 AM