Social Bookmarking master site built for StomerNet SMARTS (Social Marketing Traffic Secrets) members for easy social bookmarking. Minimalist design for clear presentation of organized sortable data. Implemented javascript (jquery) libraries for sorting and paging tables, javascript used to control visibility of elements on the page. Very simple and organized design, but still contain loads of information.

Overview

In flash you can have text areas that are rendered as html. You can also apply formatting styles to this html. This will show a simple example on how to apply css to html text in flash. I’ll do a simple anchor tag style to show you the ropes. We’ll style a link to be underlined and then when you hover or mouse over it, we’ll change the color. It’s a design style that is widely used online in html, but flash doesn’t natively do it. As a matter of fact, flash doesn’t even natively underline links.

Steps

1. Import TextField.StyleSheet
2. create a style sheet object: var myCSS:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
3. Specify your styles: myCSS.setStyle(“a:link”, {color:’#0000CC’,textDecoration:’underline’});
4. Ensure that the text box is html enabled: myHTML.htmlText = myHTMLText;
5. Apply the style sheet object to your html text box: myHTML.styleSheet = myCSS;

Example

Actionscript

Download

open source flashhtmlcss.zip

Add this to the list of things I should have already known!

Story

I’ve got an html enabled text box and was trying to devise a way that I could have a hyperlink anchor tag not link to a webpage but actually do something flash. It didn’t seem possible, and I looked through all the different html css combinations I could think of. I finally resorted to trying to use some component like Deng or FlashML. FlashML had a smaller footprint and seemed to do more what I wanted, so I started investigating it. To my dismay, the support for it was few and far between. I found an older version that came with an example file and then a newer one with some documentation but no example and I found no examples any where else. So Lee, if you ever read this, some new examples could be nice. In the documentation I was reading about a functino called AddASFunction and the example html line was very interesting:

I started looking through the rest of the documentation to find this asfunction use. But all it had was:
The href attribute can include the asfunction string which allows the link provided by the anchor to call a function in Flash. More of this can be found within the addASFunction definition in this help document.
I knew I was on to something, asfunction. So a quick google search and I found the official doc! I was shocked that I had the tool to do this the whole time! Well, shocked and feeling like an idiot for never having heard of it before. I knew it could be done somehow, but had no idea that it was already a feature of htmlText in flash! So now that you know my embarrassing story, I’ll let you in on the secret.

Overview

In flash, you can allow html text within a text area. You either set the text html property as true with actionscript (my_txt.html = true;) or click the ‘Render text as HTML’ button in the properties window of the text area. You cannot enable html text on static text areas however. You can have links and various html elements (but not full html). Usually links have a url in the href attribut of the anchor tag, but flash will read a special value of ‘asfunction’ which specifies that an actionscript function is to be called rather than a url. The correct syntax is asfunction followed by a colon and then the name of the actionscript function to be called, optionally followed by a comma and a possible single argument to be passed to the specified function (href=”asfunction:functionName,argument”).

Steps

1. Enable html in the text box.
2. Have your function (ex: functionName) ready to be called from the html link.
3. Give the href attribute of the anchor tag a property “asfunction:functionName,argument” Notice that the official documentation calls for spaces after punctuation, but any space you put after the colon (:) or comma (,) will be sent to the function in the argument, or will expect a space in the function name and give you a headache.

Example

In this example I’ve got an html enabled text box with 4 links. The first is a standard link (I hope you know what that does). The next link calls an actionscript function with asfunction. The third link sends a single argument to another function. And the last link sends multiple arguments to yet another function. Wait! Multiple arguments? I thought I said only one was supported, well this example shows how to send multiple arguments disguised as a single param and parse them. It’s pretty simple actually.

Actionscript

HTML

Download Source

asfunction.zip

I’ve had a couple special requests to explain flashvars and how to use it and show it in action.

Overview

The property “FlashVars” can be used to import root level variables to the flash movie or swf. The flashvars propery is used in codes for embedding flash in the html page. The string of variables passed in as flashvars, will be imported into the top level of the movie when it is first instantiated. Variables are created before the first frame of the SWF is played. The format of the string is a set of name=value combinations separated by ampersand (&) symbols.

Steps

1. Include the flashvars property in your embed codes and voila! You have these variables to use in your swf.
2. That’s the one step

Code

HTML Embed Codes

Actionscript using flashvars

Example

Page 1 (var1=val1&var2=val2&var3=val3)
Page 2 (var1=here&var2=are&var3=my&var4=flashvars)

Source

Download the html files and the fla and swf in this flashvars.zip

Intro to CSS

We use css to apply styles to certain elements on the page, we can target any div like this:

HTML

CSS

Any class selector <div class=”divClass”> like this:

HTML

with this:

CSS

or any id selector, <div id=”divID”> like this:

HTML

with this:

CSS

These are the basics of css. Use an element tag name to target it, use a dot to access class names and a hash (#) to represent id names. A lot can be done with just that, but sometimes you may want to access something differently, an option is to use attribute selection.

Overview

More advanced we can apply styles to elements based on their attributes. Attribute selectors use the attributes of the tag.
We can use attribute selection to specify certain elements to stylize. For example if we have a page with many images but only certain ones have title attributes, which we want to stand out more, this css rule would do the trick:

CSS

It would cause any image with a title tag (no matter what the value of the title tag is) to have a 2px wide solid black border, such as <img title=”MyImage” src=”/images/sample.jpg” /> or <img title=”" src=”/images/sample.jpg” /> but not <img src=”/images/sample.jpg” /> because it has no title attribute.

HTML

Further we can specify which values of the title attribute we want to target. If we want to stylizee links to a certain site we can do this: a[href="http://blog.circlecube.com"] { }

CSS

it would style <a href=”http://blog.circlecube.com”>This link</a> but not <a href=”http://blog.circlecube.com/2008/05/21/”>this one</a> because it is not an exact match, nor <a href=”http://www.google.com”>this one</a> because it isn’t a match either, or at all.

HTML

For another example, if we want to stylize local links differently than absolute links, we’d want to look at the beginning of the attribute’s value only so we’d use ‘^=’. We could have something like this:
a[href^="http://"], a[href^="https://"] {
background: url(/images/external.gif) no-repeat right center;
padding-right:20px;
}
it would style <a href=”http://www.google.com”>This link</a> because it begins with ‘http://’ but not <a href=”/2008/05/21/”>this one</a> because it is does not begin with ‘http://’. But it would also style <a href=”https://paypal.com”>this</a> because it matches the selector after the comma ‘https://’, and even <a href=”http://blog.circlecube.com/2008/05/21/”>this</a> will be styled, because the link is absolute (even though it is local) so be careful with how you use it.

HTML

Summary

Hoping you will see the pattern and can use the rest of these somehow (I’m drawing blank on interesting examples),

1 is: [attribute] exists

target anchors with any titles attributes.

CSS

HTML

2 equal: [attribute=x] equals x

target only anchors where the title attribute contains something exactly

CSS

HTML

3 hat: [attribute^=x] starts with x

target instances where something comes at the beginning of the attribute. This can prefix a word or even be the first word in a phrase or sentance.

CSS

HTML

4 dollar: [attribute$=x] ends with x

instances where something comes at the end of the attribute. This can be the suffix of the word or the last word in a phrase.

CSS

HTML

5 asterisk: [attribute*=x] contains x

or even titles which contain a certain word somewhere/anywhere in the attribute. This wildcard be anywhere, in a word, as a word, whatever.

CSS

HTML

6 tilde: [attribute~=x] one of which is exactly x.

a space-separated list of “words”, one of which is exactly x.

CSS

HTML

7 pipe: [attribute|=x] which first word is exactly x.

a hyphen-separated list of “words”, first word is exactly x.

CSS

HTML

view all examples on this page.
refer to w3 for more

Let me know what you come up with or if I’ve left out any essentials.