Hoss Gifford has figured out a way to dynamically resize a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The practical application of this is now you can have your movie resize based on how much content there is to display. Being able to scroll with the browsers scroll bar instead of creating a separate flash scrollbar is the chief benefit to this technique. To accomplish this Gifford uses the swfObject by Geoff Stearns. Hoss has kindly made available the source code for this project under a creative commons license in hopes that someone can improve it. Check out the demo to see the resizer in action and download all the necessary files in one convenient zip.Stop making Flash scrollbars
Hoss Gifford has figured out a way to dynamically resize a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The practical application of this is now you can have your movie resize based on how much content there is to display. Being able to scroll with the browsers scroll bar instead of creating a separate flash scrollbar is the chief benefit to this technique. To accomplish this Gifford uses the swfObject by Geoff Stearns. Hoss has kindly made available the source code for this project under a creative commons license in hopes that someone can improve it. Check out the demo to see the resizer in action and download all the necessary files in one convenient zip.Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. I do this all the time when developing an app that has more then one display state. Normally, I just use it for debugging purposes.
Posted at 9:29AM on Jul 14th 2006 by John Giotta
3. The problem I see here is that the page *requires* JavaScript to work. There is no fallback if JS is off (well, except for that "Upgrade your whatever" notice). Sure, approx. 90% percent of people have JavaScript turned on (according to w3cschools). But that is potentially 10% of your users that you are blocking. As far as accessibility goes, that's pretty bad. If Joe Clarks figures are right, there are more people with JavaScript turned off then there are people in the Western Hemisphere that have detectable colorblindness.
It's a cool effect and gets the job done. However, I always saw Flash as a stand-alone technology that happens to run in a web browser. The great thing about Flash is that you don't need JavaScript to do things. You don't have to figure out if the user is running IE or FireFox. Everything works because it's all the same plugin. This hack breaks that.
What would be better is if Adobe / Macromedia recognized the problem and built some easy-to-implement system-looking scroll bar controls or built something along the lines of an HTML iframe into Flash.
Posted at 11:42AM on Jul 14th 2006 by Robert Brodrecht
4. Is it just me, or are we just swapping one scrollbar for another? Clicking large text just makes the browser scrollbar appear, with the added annoyance that the whole page shifts to the left to allow for this.
Posted at 5:47PM on Jul 14th 2006 by Anon
5. I do this all the time too, mainly for developing portal styles flash projects. Here is an example: http://www.lpn.pt
About the Javascript fallback, I don't think it is a problem because those peoples who don't have javascript enabled, I doubt if they have flash installed either. Flash need javascript for detecting the plugin and redirect the visitor to an alternate page properly if flash is not installed and need even more now with that annoying "Click to activate" patch from Microsoft. I also use javascript to make the browser back button and browser bookmark functionalities. Unfortunatelly the browser bookmark only works on IE :(
6. I like the concept but I can't recall ever designing a site that could utilize this. My text is always nested within the layout and resizing the whole movie would take away for the aesthetics of the site, which is the #1 purpose of Flash. Perhaps there will be an update that is helpful for nested text.
Posted at 8:41PM on Jul 16th 2006 by The Closet Nerd
7. If you've got DHTML menus or any other layering going on in the page, good luck to you. This is a cross-browser nightmare.
And yea, in line with what other posters have noted, this really has been done quite a lot.
Posted at 2:58PM on Jul 18th 2006 by Andy
8. Too much flash kills loading process in any website. So any designer would reduce flashy object to minimal. Making flash scrollbars means turning a website to circus.
Posted at 6:52AM on Oct 12th 2006 by Magree
1. This is the same technique I used 3 years ago while developing http://www.biomapas.lt .
This method is quite good in terms of performance and browser compliance (scrollbar working on mac), but it also has some realy nasty drawbacks. For ex.: you can only have sizes of your content lower than 4400px as flash does not support larger dimensions.
Posted at 9:12AM on Jul 14th 2006 by Paulius Uza