Flash MX Professional 2004 CSS, XML and HTML

I am unable to blame others for assuming that Flash MX Professional 2004 has full CSS support. I just know I would not make something like that up. I am sure I read that crap somewhere and by the release date ‘things changed.’ Anyway, I’m playing with my new copy of Flash MX Professional 2004 (thanks mom) and I discover that it supports only a subset of CSS. This fits in quite well with the subset of HTML still limiting the powers of Flash. In the “Preserving rich text formatting” section of Flash documentation at livedocs.macromedia.com, we are reminded that:

The following HTML tags are supported by the htmlText property text fields: a, b, font color, font face, font size, i, p, and u…The following HTML attributes are supported in text fields: leftmargin, rightmargin, align, indent, and leading.

This, of course, totally sucks. However, the limited CSS support does provide some mitigation (especially when the HTML becomes XHTML). And this is revealed, when we examine the other (more exhaustive) list of supported HTML tags under the “Supported HTML tags” section—because this section leads to the wonderful “Formatting text with Cascading Style Sheets” section, which is quite a long walk in the park.

What is an unequivocal success in Flash MX 2004 is the full support of UTF-8, so all of our typographic glyphs show up without a problem… One strange HTML tag supported by Flash MX 2004 is the textformat tag. This is not a w3c element and just slides in there without justification or explanation. Macromedia smacks her bitch up.

rasx()