Question: In the cases where you say "the flash player won't work in old browsers", will those particular "old browsers" at least get the plaintext HTML link to the sample, then?
If so, then that's the perfect solution for me.
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that one. I don't have a browser old enough to test that with. By "old" we are talking about before IE 4, Firefox 1.0 and Netscape 4.5 (at least).
I've been looking for somewhere that summaries "object tag support through the ages", but I can't find anything useful.