Recently people have started noticing something odd. They have to click on a flash file, java applet, or any other interactive component before using it. You may see the message "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control" What causes this? Thanks to a patent troll by Eolas Technologies, Microsoft has chosen to make a change to their Internet Exporer interface for all content that requires an <applet>, <object>, or <embed> tag.
A Ridiculous Patent
I'm not going to go into the specifics, but Eolas filed the patent this century
[edit: I take that back, issued 1998] and basically claims to have invented the process of using interactive content on the internet. The W3C has even
gotten involved, claiming that documents published over a decade ago qualify as prior art against this ridiculous patent.
Eolas wants 521 million dollars from Microsoft to license the priviledge of allowing IE 6 to work the way it has worked since 2001. Oh, and they don't care about licensing to the browsers with smaller market share (Mozilla, Opera, et al). How funny.
LevelTen is already prepared
Clients of LevelTen need not worry, as we have been using the methods required to sidestep this frivolous ordeal for years, and have noticed no changes to sites we have produced.
Read more at MSDN for an explanation of the problem and different solutions.
Or if you want a quick solution, use this
code generator
