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Silverlight

Silverlight iFrame blocked by WordPress.com!

Ivana Tilca contacted me the other day because she had a problem posting Silverlight content on her blog. On further inspection it turns out it’s impossible to post Silverlight content using the iFrame method on WordPress.com hosted blogs! And since you have limited access to the code set in these blogs I’m guessing the very cumbersome JavaScript method will be equally unsuccessful.

Why is this important? With Silverlight, Microsoft wants to put up some serious competition against Adobe Flash. But if the embedding code is being blocked because it is unsafe (and iFrames are unsafe) it means people will chose other media to put on their blogs – no point putting it there if it doesn’t work. I have yet to test any other blogging services but WordPress.com is one of the majors and if Silverlight content is pretty much excluded from these blogs it is a big deal.

Considering Silverlight is being touted as a viable alternative to viral video sharing, this is a problem that needs to be fixed asap.

As for the reasoning behind blocking iFrame and JavaScript embeds in WordPress.com it actually makes a lot of sense:

You can embed malicious code and other nasty crap using these codes. And once something is posted on the service WordPress becomes somewhat responsible for the content. So if someone posts malicious content like a virus using an iFrame on their service, you can be sure people will sue them for it. Or the whole service can go down like what happened to MySpace.

True – WordPress.com allows certain “approved” JavaScript and iFrame codes – and Microsoft better get in touch with them immediately (by clicking here) – but the current embed options, both JavaScript and iFrame, are lackluster, cumbersome and not at all workable. There needs to be a better and less wishywashy solution if this format is to succeed. Otherwise people like Ivana are going to go crazy and abandon the format. And that’s not good.

By Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and lynda.com specializing in WordPress and web design and development and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is a popular speaker and educator on all things design, web standards and open source. As the owner and Web Head at Pink & Yellow Media, a boutique style digital media company in Burnaby, BC, Canada, he has created WordPress-based web solutions for multi-national companies, political parties, banks, and small businesses and bloggers alike. He also contributes to the local WordPress community by organizing Meetups and WordCamps.

17 replies on “Silverlight iFrame blocked by WordPress.com!”

Hi, Morton.

Thanks for this post – very helpful in that it raises an excellent point! I’ll look into this for you and see what I can find out for you (and other WordPress fans out there). More to come…

Regards,

Paul

yeah typepad also support it. thanks for the article by the way. i thought finally we will have a simpler code to manage not that old embed thing but then we have limitations. hopefully we will have a workaround soon. we’re developing a live broadcast service with silverlight. will do the closed beta soon. but the reason why i wanted to show this is how embed player works on typepad hosted blog: http://blog.myshowroom.tv/2008/03/my-new-embed-pl.html

Viktor: I’m very interested in your live broadcast service using Silverlight. I work a lot with publishing video online and I’ve been wondering how long it would take before people start rolling out full-fledged Silverlight based video sites. Keep us posed on the progress!

i’ve either tried to embed a map from google maps and a video from cnn video section and i couldn’t in my wordpress.com blog. and, i spent an hour trying to understand what was going on where i had sat down just to write a quick post. pretty annoying but, hey, these are the always present temporary incompatibily issues. =)

This blog aided me in narrowing down some issues with the latest release, Why do they always leave out vital documentation when they upgrade? It may be minor to them but not to me. I’m sure i’m not alone either.

Your blog has helped, thanks. I have encountered it a couple of times now and will most certainly take a note of it. You actually may well really want to upgrade wordpress as there may be a new version readily available at this moment!

Your blog has helped, thanks. I have encountered it once or twice today and will almost certainly bookmark it. You may want to update wordpress as there exists a new version obtainable at present!

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