If you’ve written at least once the OBJECT and EMBED tags, without copy/paste you may have been noticed that the place of the EMBED tag is a bit strange. Actually after the OBJECT tag, comes the PARAM sequence, that simply defines different parameters for the flash movie.

And what looks strange?

The strange thing in all this is that the EMBED tag, which in fact is only one, instead of the case with all the parameters of the OBJECT, is displayed just before the closing of the OJBECT tag.

Experimenting …

What if the embed tag is outside of the OBJECT opening and closing tags. Actually only IE understands this as a problem. Than it displays the move twice!

That’s why the place of the EMBED is just before closing the OBJECT tag. In that case MSIE doesn’t “see” the EMBED and displays everything correctly!

On IE actually you should setup the class on an element with that structure:

element.setAttribute('className', 'my-class');

While developing your next site, you’ve may noticed that under IE, specially version 6, it’s very hard to debug any kind of JavaScript code. Yes actually if you’ve configured the browser for that purpose you may get any message, which unfortunately is completely useless. In general the message is something like: “There’s an script error on some line of the code!”, but very often there’s no such line of code or it’s empty or something else. Actually that poor debugger is giving the error by the generated script code which really does not help.

Microsoft Script Debugger

The installation of Microsoft Script Debugger solves this problem. It gives the line and the code, even highlights the error.

frameborder=”0″ attribute

<iframe frameborder=”0″ … ></iframe> is helping

Recently I wrote an article about the Google Adsense problem with page load blocking and than the solution was simple and elegant. You must put your ad in a separate .html file and to include it into your page with an iframe. That gives the page the ability to “breath” and to load faster.

You can see the entire article here.

When everything’s OK, wait for the IE

Yes as usual every browser loaded the iframe correclty, except … IE. Both 6 and 7. What was the problem of that lovely browser? Just as I mentioned in my previous article, I put the Google generated code chunk in a .html file and include it with an iframe.

So far so good. But was actually stoped in on IE. All the developer plugins of IE were incapable of helping me.

Finally the solution

The solution itself is so strange and stupid. The file you include your ad banner should be named “index”. If you have three ads on your page, and three iframes you must include three index.html files, obviously from different directories. That finally made IE working as the other world.

Everybody knows how to debug the front end on Firefox. There are some awsome tools, which help to manage your work. We all use “Web Developer” and the ready to enter the history “Firebug”. Both tools can be downloaded and installed for free, but what about IE and the misterious DOM rendering there.

The DebugBar

One of the two plugins I recommend for IE is IE Developer Toolbar. That plugin perfectly solves the problem of viewing the rendered code from the browser. That helps a lot when debuggin front end, and I mainly use it for that. Download from here.

IE Developer Toolbar

That’s the most famous IE plugin for web developers with no need to be commented. Every web developer with no exception should use it on IE to find the mistery around that browser. Download from here.

Although the SWFObject method – createSWF is working fine under IE sets the wmode not to be transparent but with the strange value of window, i.e. <PARAM name=”WMode” value=”Window” />

The Solution is …

to replace the createSWF method calls with other SWFObject method – embedSWF. There you can simply describe the desired wmode for the flash.