Silverlight iFrame blocked by WordPress.com!
Silverlight February 20th. 2008, 10:34pmIvana 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.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:55 am
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
February 21st, 2008 at 9:16 am
thanks morton!!! we tried everything and silverlight did not work.. from argentina…
February 26th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
That’s why I use Blogger.com it’s IFrame friendly with Silverlight at least..
April 7th, 2008 at 3:30 am
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
April 7th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
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!
April 15th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hi Morten, thanks for your comment. sure we will let you know how this is shaping. we posted the enrollment functionality to our site http://www.myshowroom.tv. please feel free to sign up we will send out invite codes shortly. great blog by the way!
July 31st, 2008 at 11:01 am
hey, tks for the article…I was looking for this information!
tks from brazil!
cya
August 23rd, 2008 at 6:42 am
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. =)