[Gnash-dev] gnash plugin description and JavaScript libraries

[Tim Retout]

Hi all,

I'm running gnash trunk. I have found that there are JavaScript
libraries for detecting Adobe Flash which do not recognise Gnash as a
Flash player; for example, BBC Glow [0].  A good test case is to try
to play one of the programmes on BBC iPlayer [1]. It says that Flash
was not detected, and does not serve up a swf file at all. I tracked
this down to the copyright notice at the end of Gnash's plugin
description [2].

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/
[2] http://retout.co.uk/blog/2010/07/19/gnash-and-bbc-glow

I'm attaching a patch to do a similar thing to Lightspark (and e.g.
Totem's browser plugin), but with more text.  This keeps the copyright
notice on about:plugins, but sets the actual description to something
that all libraries should recognise.

It's a bit of a hack. Apparently parentheses and semicolons are not
allowed in mime type descriptions, so I had to use a unicode copyright
symbol. If this is a problem, one alternative is to use "&copy"
(without a semicolon, which is awful), or to omit the symbol
altogether. Or perhaps live without a copyright notice at all.

-- 
Tim Retout <address@hidden>

gnash-plugin-description.patch
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