No Hyperlinks on MySpace!!?

I have been tasked by Finetune to determine how to allow outgoing links from the Finetune Embeddable Player to work on MySpace.

When I first looked at this request, I was puzzled. The allowNetworking=internal security changes in the Flash Player 9 totally slipped my radar.

I examined this closely, as I couldn't believe that this security feature would actually be this stringent. After realizing that this is the case, and our player, while able to load content from Finetune, is crippled in terms of being able to drive traffic back to the Finetune service.

To be honest, I feel a bit embarrassed. I, being a huge advocate of the Flash Platform for quite some time now, and also a strong believer in the "web of services loosely coupled" web 2.0 mentality, am now forced to tell my client that there is no way to allow our embeddable music player to link back to the Finetune homepage.

I am forced to tell them that the most fundamental, and core feature that the world wide web is built upon will will not work when embedded on a MySpace page. That is a huge win (sarcasm) for the Flash Player. We are in a world where I can write a SWF in memory using actionscript 3 and load it on the fly, but I am being stopped from hyper linking out to another web page.

So, my frustration with this was at first directed at MySpace. At first I thought that for a company that claims to be at the center of the Web 2.0 revolution, blocking hyperlinks seems like a radical violation of the web 2.0 manifesto.

So, I start to try things to build my case. I create a JPG image and go to my MySpace profile. I embed it using an IMG tag, then put an A tag on it to link to Finetune.com.

BIG SUPRISE! It works!!

http://www.myspace.com/elevadertek


So, my anger turns away from MySpace and to Adobe. Why would they implement something as crippling as this? I realize people could abuse "javascript:" but wouldn't it make sense to filter that out as opposed to blocking getURL() completely?

Perhaps I haven't looked deep enough yet, but I have so far been unable to find an explanation of why the allowNetworking param is so extremely stringent.

If anyone could shed some light I would greatly appreciate it, as I need to explain it to my client.