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.