w3blog

This weekend i continued to play with Flash Player 8.5 alpha, and did something kinda crazy (at least i thought so when i started).. I tried to render high resolution GIS data purely clientside with Flash.

In the beginning, i was just searching for detailed, free, redistributable map data of the world, with political country boundaries, and maybe state boundaries too, to write a simple world map component. I was scanning through a lot of link lists, and almost all material i found was either incomplete, not detailed enough or expensive. Except the “Vector Smart Map Level 0 Library”, a huge (1.8GB), free and redistributable collection of all sorts of high detailed geographic data, published by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

If you move your mouse pointer over a hyperlink in an HTML webpage, your
browser typically displays the URL in it’s status bar. In addition, if
the hyperlink has a title attribute set, a tooltip is shown with
a human readable description of the linked resource.

Unfortunately, with rich text used in Flash websites/applications this is
not the case. Your mouse pointer will change to a “hand-cursor”, indicating
you’re hovering a hyperlink, but the status bar will stay empty, and the title
attribute is ignored by Flash, making it impossible for you to find out
where the hyperlink will take you without actually clicking it - a severe
accessibility problem.

With Flash Player 8.5, the behaviour of hyperlinks in rich text controls
hasn’t changed, but luckily Macromedia implemented some nifty API extensions
making it possible to actually find out if the user is hovering a hyperlink
in a HTML enabled TextField.

You heard the news already, Macromedia launched their Labs site today, along with public alphas of Flash Player 8.5, Flex Builder 2 and the Flex Framework 2.

Among the first things i did with those alpha goodies was porting the DENG CSS 3 parser to Actionscript 3.

The W3C published a new working draft of their XFrames specification today, an XML application designed to replace HTML Frames.

XFrames solves most usability problems known from HTML Frames (Back button, bookmarking, page reloads, search engine woes, etc) by introducing a new URI reference notation…

Macromedia announced the Flash Player 8.5 today, featuring a completely new virtual machine (AVM2), E4X, RegExp, Binary Sockets and W3C DOM Events. Flash Player 8.5 (along with the Flex 2 Framework and Flex Builder 2) will be released as public alpha on October 17th. This marks the beginning of the development of DENG 2.0, a completely refactored DENG version targeted for Flash Player 8.5 and above.

I just published a new DENG build, that fixes some bugs (memory leaks, whitespace as first character in a block element, _level0 references and callbacks in deng.swf) and adds some minor features (support for <ul /> and <br />)