Next Generation Browser Is Flash the next generation web browser Clas Le Petit, 2006-08-21 As I already brought to you, that Adobe has great plans for Flash. It wants to make it a "Mädchen für Alles" - not only a browser plugin for animations and video on the web, but a programming platform for the desktop as well. Today I stumbled over the InformIT article "Advanced Text Treatment With CSS" by Matthew David. It was a real eye opener for me. I know that Flash is capable of nicely formatting text, using HTML and CSS and, but I have to admit, I haven't used it much. I always thought that it was a bit complicated and error prone. So I have used Flash for a long time for animations and video and avoided text, except for buttons and short help texts. In his article Matthew describes elegantly, how to present an XML document in Flash, styling it with CSS. Not only is it XML, where you can use your own markup, but both the content document and the CSS are external files. Only the Actionscript knitting together the XML and CSS is compiled into the resulting SWF. This is essential, as you can, at any time, change the content and styling, without recompiling the Flash "movie". You don't even have to know anything about Flash or have access to the Flash authoring tool. The text you are reading here, is presented in your Flash plugin. Flash uses an XML object to load the content file and a TextField.StyleSheet object to load the CSS file. This makes me believe, that very soon we will see a web browser written completely in Actionscript. There will certainly be some issues to address, before such a browser can compete with existing ones, but we can expect beatiful web sites to emerge, using the plugin. As an example of strange behavior, I didn't succeed to present the image above with correct dimensions. When I have the time to explore this avenue a bit more, I'll let you know. For now I challenge you to write that browser ;)