Topic: Flash Cross-Browsing & Printing

I'm almost positive Flash is capable of doing (or at least faking) the two following tasks:

- displaying with colours, margins, fonts etc. that are compatable with the user's browser regardless of what that browser is, i.e. a PC user would see the content in IE as if it was optimised for IE, a Mac user would see the content in Safari as if it was optimised for Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc.

- feature a "print" button that opens a seperate, ready-to-print window that displays the content in a printer-friendly but still graphic-rich version.

Any thoughts on where such resources might be found?

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein

Do I understand correctly, you want to make a (X)HTML+CSS renderer in Flash. Right ?

What kind of (X)HTML do you aim for ? Excuse my ignorance but, is Flash capable of generating a valid XML tree from any crap found on the net ? Otherwise you'll have to limit yourself to valid XHTML or code a loose parser and that's not funny.

Even if you limit your renderer to margin, padding, font and color, there's quite a few ways these properties can be set : inline style, style in the head, imported style, cascading, a combination of all of that. And yet parsing these properties is just the tip of the iceberg. How do you render them ? the standard way ( with margin-collapsing, normal box model, ... ) or in quirk mode.

You mention Print, do you want to parse stylesheets for the Print medium or apply the default one ?


Well I'm sure it's technically possible regardless of the language but for a second, try to imagine the amount of man years put in browsers like IE, FF, OP, SF. Even if say 5 persons worked on the parser and layout engine, that represent more than 50 man years of work.

I don't have any Flash ressource, but the (X)HTML and CSS standards are open and the specs are all available on http://w3.org


May I ask why you want to do this ? is it just by sheer curiosity, for educational purpose or for a professionnal commitment ?

Professional, but the point is moot, as my supervisor doesn't want anything in Flash, just (X)HTML/CSS.

To that end, my post & problem have moved here: http://www.ozoneasylum.com/28594

~~~
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein