There has been an important new development in the battle over standards in the browser community. The "Click to Activate" required by all versions of Internet Explorer when using the standard embedding technique for Flash elements will go away in April of 2008. You heard me correctly! The majority of your clients websites there will no longer be a need to use JavaScript to load Flash elements on to the page.

Via the IEBlog -

Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, we're removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer! 

	Before April 2006	After April 2006 IE Active X update	After April 2008 Removal
Controls Injected Via JavaScript	No “Click to Activate”	No “Click To Activate”	No “Click To Activate”
Controls loaded Direct In HTML (<object>, <embed>, <applet>)	No “Click to Activate”	“Click To Activate” Required	No “Click To Activate”

Notice that I said "the majority" of your clients websites. There is till the issue of Flash elements with events that can be called before the page load completes. Wow, that last sentence may set some sort of record for "most nerdy sentence". I will discuss this last issue in more detail for part 4 of "Flash embedding vs. Flash scripting".