Hi everyone Further to my presentation at the last Sydney meeting (on a Flash html to (x)html converter), I said I'd take a look at the new CSS stuff available with the new Flash Player 7.
In the ActionScript dictionary shipped with FlashMX04 a reasonable amount is spent detailing the new stylesheet importer. This is all pretty standard stuff although I noticed the examples use classes rather than id's in the imported stylesheets. (no # support?). Unfortunately the CSS is, as described in the Manual, a limited set of the CSS1 Recommendation and can be seen at http://whatdoiknow.org/snaps/mx_css_support1.shtml The most interesting thing here is the tag support in FP7 and can be divided into two subsets - HTML and XML. HTML FP7 supports all the HTML4 tags that FP6 supports.. P, A, B, U, FONT, BR, LI (still no UL or OL). plus.. IMG - text floats around images, I'm assuming the img floats to the left of the containing textfield. I wonder if a class can be added to the image specifying a text alignment to move it right/center? SPAN - inline support now exists, can add classes to the tag and apply styles via the class. Makes B, U and I redundant. BODY - interesting ?? A:link, :hover and :active More interesting is that Flash Player 7 applies styles to author specified "xml" like tags. e.g <org>WSG</org><description>The WSG ....</description> In relation to the FHTML - XHTML wysiwyg converter we could provide a textfield that allows our marketing dept users to write content according to a predefined style, applying tags to the text using mouse selections and export that resulting "XML based" markup to the server. Once there we could apply XSLT to style the content for supporting browsers....or convert it to HTML if we want, saving the original xml style markup for editing by our users. Further, if we have these user specified tags styled by CSS then what's stopping us using a user specified tag like "<h1>" or "<acronym>" that just happen to be in the HTML rec. ?? :D I think a bit more experimentation is needed but a lot of this answers some of the questions bought up at the last meeting. Could be well on the way to having a standardised wysiwyg editor without having to do dodgy string replacements. The last point is Flash Player 7 footprint.. although this is not really an issue given that something like this would be used to publish markup content for web users.. just have to specify FP7 to the content managers as required. Regards James Ellis www.webqs.com --- WSG - http://webstandardsgroup.org | Web Standards Group syd::php - http://sydney.ug.php.net | Sydney PHP Developers --- #300 - http://www.sitepoint.com/articlelist/300 --- ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
