Rants,Raves and Ruminations

Sometimes it just pays to pay attention and Read The Frikkin' Manual...

Downloaded and installed the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 updater and noticed, when opening a page with Flash content, that I was essentially being told by Dreamweaver that thanks to our good friends at Microsoft I needed to up to update my object tags and would I let Dreamweaver do the deed?

Sounded fine to me so I clicked the “Yes” button and life became a wonderful thing. That was until I heard from a colleague that she was looking at a blank page. Turns out, the instructions in that dialog box are not exactly clear. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Open a page containing a Flash SWF in Dreamweaver 8.0.02. You will see a dialog box with the following wording:

“This page contains object tags that may not work properly in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer. To correct this problem you can covert these tags to browser safe scripts.Do you want Dreamweaver to convert these tags for you?”

2) Click the Yes button. Clicking the “Help” button takes you to a Tech Note regarding this change and clicking the Preferences button just opens the Preferences.

When you click the Yes button the tags are all changed in the page and Dreamweaver adds a Scripts folder to your site root. Inside that folder is a file- AC_RunActiveContent.js - which is what makes your Flash SWF appear on the web page on the server. Yo may notice the Scripts folder isn’t immediately visible.

3) If you click “Yes” to create that folder with the .js file, click the Refresh button in the Files panel. This will refresh the local list of files and the Script folder will now be vsible.

4) Though Adobe is suggesting you click Yes in the dependent Files dialog box when you upload your page, an foolproof method is to simply select the Scripts folder and click the Put button to upload the folder to your site.

If you are a regular bithead then feel free to check out the Tech Note here.

Converting Active Content with the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 Updaters