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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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One of the new features in Flash MX 2004 is the support for Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, in the Flash Player. In this article you will learn where and how to apply CSS formatting in a Flash movie.

A Little History

I am not going to get too long-winded and give you a detailed history of Cascading Style Sheets. I'll only to go so far as to mention this: Cascading Style Sheets enable designers to apply controlled style formatting to HTML in web pages.

The first web browser to support CSS was Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The support was not very complete. The browser limited your use of CSS to only simple text modifications. However the concept was building upon an open standard endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium Group. Stronger support was added by the Internet Explorer team to later versions of the web browser, and companies such as Netscape, Opera and open source initiatives such as Mozilla and KHTML add support for CSS.

Today, millions of Web pages are delivered to your web browser with CSS formatting. Designer tools, such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage, will use CSS for controlling the properties of elements such as font color, size and position relative to the web page.

Over the last couple of years, Macromedia has been striving to extend the functionality of Flash. You may well have heard the term "Rich Internet Application" being thrown around by Macromedia as a way to describe the complex applications that can be constructed with Flash. A large part of Rich Internet Applications is the ability to manage and move complex levels of data. Data can take many forms. It can be numbers, strings of letters or html formatted text. If you are extracting your data from a database you may well be coming into contact with data that is formatted as HTML.

The formatting of the HTML may well be controlled with CSS. Until the launch of the Flash 7 Player, you lost your support for CSS formatting in Flash. Now that has all changed.

CSS in the Flash Player

As you might expect, CSS support in the Flash Player is managed with ActionScript, the programming language Flash uses. You will find that you are limited to what you can and can not do.

What you can do is apply CSS formatting to standard HTML tags such as <P>, <LI> and <BODY> tags. You can also control the <A> tag and three states for the <A> tag (link style, hover style and active style), however, unlike a web page, you can not supply a color that demonstrates that you have selected a link. Visited link colors, common to all browsers, is beyond the scope of Flash largely because Flash handles the movement of hyper text links completely differently to a Web browser. Finally, you can apply custom class styles to HTML formatted text.

Unfortunately, there's a lot you can't do with CSS in Flash. You cannot control the position of objects on the stage; you are limited to simple font formatting such as color, font family and style. CSS is a very comprehensive style formatting language. Flash is only tapping a very limited subset of the most basic elements to CSS.

The following table is a complete list of the CSS properties supported in the Flash 7 Player.

CSS Property	Usage and Supported Values
text-align	Recognized values are left, center, and right.
font-size	Only the numeric part of the value is used; units (px, pt) are not parsed; pixels and points are equivalent.
text-decoration	Recognized values are none and underline.
margin-left	Only the numeric part of the value is used. Units (px, pt) are not parsed; pixels and points are equivalent.
margin-right	Only the numeric part of the value is used. Units (px, pt) are not parsed; pixels and points are equivalent.
font-weight	Recognized values are normal and bold.
font-style	Recognized values are normal and italic.
text-indent	Only the numeric part of the value is used. Units (px, pt) are not parsed; pixels and points are equivalent.
font-family	A comma-separated list of fonts to use, in descending order of desirability. Any font family name can be used. If you specify a generic font name, it will be converted to an appropriate device font. The following font conversions are available: mono is converted to _typewriter, sans-serif is converted to _sans, and serif is converted to _serif.
color	Only hexadecimal color values are supported. Named colors (like blue) are not supported.
display	Supported values are inline, block, and none.

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