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 />)

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…

The FormFaces project team announced their open source ECMAScript XForms solution today. The engine processes XForms entirely on the client side and runs on any ECMAScript and DOM Level 2 powered Webbrowser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Konquerer, Safari and others)…