w3blog

I originally posted this on the OSFlash mailinglist, but i thought it would make a good blog post, so here it is. My vision of a next generation web application framework.

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.

Inspired by a blog post by John Dowdell, who was raising the question if it would be possible to trigger a SVG rendering SWF to do the work in case the user’s browser is not SVG enabled, i sat down last night to figure out if this could be solved using mod_rewrite on the serverside in combination with DENG. It actually is possible, with a few constraints. Check out these SVGs (and make sure you have at least the Flash Player 6 installed and enabled) [...]

DENG 1.0 has been around for a long time now (almost three years), and there hasn’t been any new code release for quite a while, so some of you might wonder what we’ve been up to, and what the plans are.

Recently, i continued porting the DENG1 CSS parser to ECMAScript 4, and making it fully compliant to the CSS 3 specification. The current AS1 version of the parser already has many CSS 3 features implemented, but not all of them (like the nth-child(), nth-last-child(), nth-of-type() and nth-last-of-type() pseudo classes for example, that required a special type of argument that wasn’t supported by the parser yet). Part of the work was commenting changes in the grammar, to know what was added or changed from the CSS 2.1 grammar, and to verify if the existing code fully conforms to the CSS 3 grammar. I figured this might be an interesting read for some of you, so here it is…