Hacking around the Eolas patch the ugly-as-sin way

The Eolas vs Internet Explorer case has been getting a lot of attention lately, since it is almost time the patch is released in the wild. To make a long story short: Internet Explorer 6 and the upcoming version 7 will display plugin content differently from the 'seamless' experience we're used to. Whereas most plugins (Flash, Windows Media) will 'only' require an additional click to enabled interactivity, some plugins such as Quicktime and Shockwave result in an ugly dialog box when they are found on a page. The official workaround has authors rewrite each HTML page containing the 'offending' tags substantially.

I think I have found the shortest, ugliest way around the patch. This workaround shows just how little sense it all makes. It works like a charm, but is ugly as sin, and I would not really recommend it. But here we go anyway.

Add this line of HTML immediately before the current object/param/embed tagsoup (any plugin should work):

<!--[if gte IE 6]><SCRIPT language="javascript" src="repairembed.js"><![endif]--></SCRIPT>

This is the content of the repairembed.js script:

document.write("<NOSCRIPT>")

window.onload = function() {
 document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/\<noscript\>/gi,"")
}

And that's all. Note that the added line and script are generic for all (types of) content, and the script is about 140 bytes...

Here's the technique in action, displaying a panorama using Shockwave:
http://www.fieldofview.com/temp/repairembed.html

All browsers except IE will happily display the tagsoup as they did before; The (opening of) the script tag in the added line is commented out.

IE6 and newer (ruling out IE 5.5 on Mac, which I don't think will be Eolas-patched) are the only browsers that see through the comment and execute the script. The script masquerades the object/param/embed tag behind a noscript tag just in time so the activation-check is not triggered. The rest of the script removes the masquerading noscript tag after the check is done. If scripting is disabled in IE, you still need to activate the control, but there's no way around that.

The script closing tag is a bit odd, but it broke the conditional comment in IE if I put it in the comment.

So there you have it, a single generic line of HTML, that does not need to be changed if you want to embed another file, or even another plugin. But boy, is it ugly. And silly.

Update: This makes the hack a bit less ugly for other browsers than IE:

<!--[if gte IE 6]><SCRIPT language="javascript" src="repairembed.js"><![endif]--><SCRIPT></SCRIPT>

And this makes sure the script doesn't remove noscript tags that should not be removed:

document.write("<NOSCRIPT id=fix>")

window.onload = function() {
 document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/\<noscript\sid=fix\>/gi,"")
}

Update 2: It's been brought to my attention that the one-line fix does not work with the IE7 beta; in that browser the fix scaps all content below the tagsoup. This can be fixed with a second line, just behind the object/param/embed tag soup:

<!--[if gte IE 6]></NOSCRIPT><![endif]-->

This also takes away most of the uglyness, but makes the hack far less cool as it's now two lines of code :-(

Final(?) update: It turns out that document.innerHTML doesn't always play nice. Here's a final alteration to the script that does not rewrite the whole document, but only the noscript node we adde

document.write("<NOSCRIPT class=fix>")

window.onload = function() {
  elems=document.getElementsByTagName("noscript");
  for(i=elems.length-1;elem=elems[i];i--) {
    if(elem.className=="fix")
      elem.outerHTML = elem.innerHTML
  }
}