I’m making a Flash version of a site and I want to avoid to put textfields and movieclips at design-time, I preferred to load an external XML and set its format with an external CSS. That way, I could use some PHP intermediate processing and build a simple CMS where data is shared between the HTML site and the Flash site.
Isn´t that how sites that have a Flash and non-Flash version do it? Keeping the content replicated seems insane to maintain and update.
I’ve realized that this would be hard when I’ve noticed that Flash only interprets a subset of the HTML/CSS standards. However, limiting myself to content with images and text, it still seems possible to load the entire page dinamically. However, I’m facing problems with images with external anchors (to web htm documents).
I first tried to read directly from the XML the code <a href=‘someplace.com/something.htm’><img src=‘someimg.jpg’/></a>, but the clickable area of the image is set wrong: I only can click in the image borders.
Second, I tried to use the ID tag of the img tag. However, when I use myTextField.getImageReference(), I get a Loader object that somehow was added as a TextField child, althought TextField isn’t a DisplayObjectContainer. The problem is that I can’t get mouse events and have the hand cursor, because Bitmap, nor Loader are Sprites.
So now I’m back to create movieclips as bitmaps containers at design-time and add these images at run-time. Maybe I could get the images pos from the XML and create sprites that contains the bitmaps at run-time. The negative of this is that it’s harder to keep the same XML/CSS for both the Flash and HTML versions of the site. Any suggestions?
