Loading Flash MX Data across Domains (Domain Names Pointing to the Same IP Address)
Back in August of 2002 Macromedia last updated “External data not accessible outside a Macromedia Flash movie’s domain.” Well, after four years, I am finally getting the message. There was a serious bug in our wonderful Audio Application that had me wondering why our Angela Davis numbers were so low. It turns out that our XML audio meta-data was not being loaded. This caused empty boxes to display and certainly left thousands wondering what the hell is going on here in the kinté space. Macromedia explains:
A company has a web site loads Flash data from its own domain. However, they discover a movie on their site is no longer able to access a file, even though the file is located in the same domain.
It’s determined that the URL the Flash movie attempts to access is located on http://company.com, which fails when accessed from http://www.company.com. While the creator of the Flash movie did not think much of this oversight, the Flash Player 7 determines that—since the “www” prefix is omitted—this must be treated as a unique and therefore prohibited domain.
Another complication to this problem is not all users are experiencing this behavior because some are accessing the site using http://company.com, while others type out the full URL in their web browser.
So Flash Player 7 (and above—I hope) can look for a “policy file” called crossdomain.xml and make it all better. We are pretty sure the bug is fixed. Test it out for us…