Flash MX Pro 2004 - Text Area Component - Transition
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The advantage of Flash MX was that it was easy to change text color or other HTML styles using standard tags inside a text file. A file could be formatted using basic HTML markup. The new release of Studio MX 2004 has forced conversion on the developer community to immediately adopt XML and CSS based content creation. While many gurus will applaud the transition as good for the future of web standardization, the abrupt transition makes adopting the new MM programs doubly difficult because it requires a person to learn XML and CSS while also trying to learn the new ActionScript 2 environment. Having been in web design since the early days (1994), I cut my teeth in design when CSS for anything more than setting font styles created major conflicts with different browsers. CSS was a headache, and XML was used primarily for cell-phones. Now that these two codes are becoming the standard, it will be necessary to learn them, but the tools to streamline the creation of XML files, for example, don't exist yet. We are in the early days of this standard, and so it is back to hand coding for the developers.
While the creation of CSS layouts in Dreamweaver MX 2004 is supported with Panels and other benefits, Flash 2004 is not able to recognize all the standard HTML tags. Some tags will be ignored or may cause Flash to choke. Since you can only use a subset of standard HTML tags in Flash, you are better off creating original CSS tags (see sample.css below) and not using Dreamweaver's default editor.
So now, in order to place anything other than a plain text into the TextArea Component, it requires a CSS file to govern text layout, a file for the text itself (written with embedded XML or HTML tags), a Class StyleSheet, and an XML object in a frame on the stage. If that sounds confusing, it is, and it is part of the reason that learning Flash 2004 is not easy. As you will see in the tutorial below, many lines of hand written code replace the elegant simplicity of Flash 5's simple URL pointer to a text file.
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