Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Installing lower version of Flash player

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Finally succeeded in downgrading flash player from version 10 to flash player version 9. I had reached a point where I was pulling my hair out and then I found this gem on Adobe’s website – Technote kb402435 .

I tried the following steps to install a lower version of the flash player

  1. Uninstall all flash player versions using the flash player uninstaller
  2. Rebooted the computer
  3. Disabled access to the internet/network
  4. re-installed an older version of the flash player
  5. Rebooted the computer again

All browsers, except for Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7), accepted the flash player. IE7 as usual gave me a hard time. This was primarily because of the ActiveX used by IE.

To resolve this, all I had to do was type the following in the command line

uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean

A detailed explaination can be found at Adobe’s website – Technote kb402435 – Safe versions security restrictions when installing Flash Player (Internet Explorer on Windows).

Additional resource that may help

Technote 14157
How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control

Technote 19166
Troubleshoot Adobe Flash Player installation for Windows

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(X)HTML alt vs title attributes Vs the TITLE tag

Monday, September 8th, 2008

“alt” attributes are NOT “alt” tags.

Phew! now that it’s out of the way lets proceed.

During our team meetings, I often hear developers and designers throw in the term “alt ” tags when referring to the “alt” attribute. A few years ago, I too, used to refer to the “alt” attribute as an “alt” tag. Infact, even the Human Factors International website incorrectly refers to these attributes as tags, well, they also incorrectly refer to the “longdesc” attribute as tags.

The W3c website clearly states that “alt” is an attribute  . The W3c website also contains information on what alt attributes are useful for. In short, Tags can be though of as elements and attributes as the properties these elements have.

For example, a car has four wheels, which are elements that make up the car. Now, these wheels can have properties. They may be made of iron, steel or some alloy. So if we compare the car to an HTML document, the wheel would be a tag and the attributes would be the property for that specific tag.

Alt attribute is used to display alternative text incase for some reason images cannot be rendered correctly. So if you had your company logo that did not render or display correctly, an alternative text would be displayed to indicate that the image that did not show is infact the company logo. More explaination on the use of the “alt” attribute can be found on the W3c website.

Another query that often pops up at team meetings is that Alternate (alt) text for images do not show in firefox. Well, alt text in firefox is displayed only if the image is not rendered correctly or if it cannot be displayed. If the image is rendered correctly, the alt text is not not shown in Firefox. If you want a tool tip to appear when the mouse is hovered on the image, the title attribute should be used for this.

Do not confuse the title attribute with the title tag (also refered to as the title element). The title tag appears within the head tag of an HTML document and can be used only once in the entire HTML document, where as the title attribute is used as an additional explainatory note.

Hope this helps to understand the difference between (X)HTML tags and attributes.

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