One of the major headache to newbie web designers is the requirement of IE and Opera to activate ActiveX controls and plugins before they can be used. I was also facing this problem. But recently I have found out that the problem cab be avoided if we embed the control using an external JavaScript file. So what I have done is wrote a function to loop through my page contents and search for these controls. On finding them, replace the content with the same content using javascript. This function can be called on page load (or directly below the html code for the plugin) and now the controls need no more activation.
Save this function as activate.js and include it in your html file
function activateControls(){
if (document.getElementsByTagName && document.body.outerHTML) {
var tag, arTag = Array('object','embed','applet');
for(tag in arTag) {
var arEl = document.getElementsByTagName(arTag[tag]);
for(var i = 0; i < arEl.length; i++) {
var el = arEl.item(i);
var params = el.getElementsByTagName('param');
var html = '';
if (params.length && !/<param/i.test(el.innerHTML))
for (var x=0;x < params.length;x++)html += params.item(x).outerHTML;
el.outerHTML = el.outerHTML.replace('>', '>' + html);
}
}
}
}
Call the function on page load. Alternately you can call the function directly below the html code for the plugin : window.onload = activateControls;
