A small issue with Flash Player 9 shows up when you do this AS2 code:

styles = new TextField.StyleSheet();
styles.setStyle(".green", {fontSize: '24px', color: '#00CC00'} );
//styles.setStyle(".almostblack", {color: '#010000'} );

this.createTextField("theField_txt", 1, 10, 10, 300, 300);
theField_txt.multiline=true; theField_txt.html = true;
theField_txt.styleSheet = this.styles;

var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li>some green text: <span class="almostblack"> </span><span class="green">Green!</span></li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'

theField_txt.htmlText = theHTML

will show up like this:



If you uncomment the almostblack style then the green bullet will look black.


If you make the almostblack style color really black 000000 instead of almost black, then the bullet will be green.

I'm assuming this will get fixed at some point and when that happens the almostblack hack won't really do anything other than be extra code that needs to be removed.
If/when it gets fixed then any pretty colored bullets made by doing this
var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li> <span class="green"> </span>black text with a green bullet</li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'
will suddenly be black.

there's also this
var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li><span class="green"> </span>black text with a black bullet</li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'
which makes a jumbo sized black bullet.

I'm doing some experimenting and trying to update some very old projects and getting kind of off the beaten track and finding some weirdness in Flash CS3 IDE..

If I open a custom panel that I've made and dropped into the windowswf folder, or if I open a panel someone else has made, I can right click somewhere on it and I get the full Flash Player context menu (Zoom In, Zoom Out, 100%, Show All, Quality, etc) and I can even add to that context menu via my code in the windowSWF. Now in other panels such as Window>Other Panels>Accessibility that are from Adobe you don't get that context menu.

So that breaks the user experience some.. but it gets even more broken. In my custom panels if I try using the "flyout" menu in the upper right corner of that panel all I see is "Help" in the menu. Clicking that takes me to the Help page for the Movie Explorer panel. Huh? I've tried this with custom panels from other folks and see the same thing.

I would expect if I specify a custom context menu from a WindowSWF that the menu items would show up in that little flyout menu but that is not what is happening. There might be some secret way of adding to that flyout menu and also disabling the "flash player" context menu that shows up in my windowSWFs. If you know that secret please share it.

ok, I spent a good bit of time chasing this one down.  the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s a bug in the “debug” version of the Flash Player 7,0,19,0 that makes it impossible to use SetVariable to communicate between JavaScript and Flash.

With Flash Player 7,0,19,0 _debug_
I can get SetVariable to work in Internet Explorer 6.0..
I can get SetVariable to work in Netscape 7.1
I can’t get SetVariable to work with Firefox 1.0

a couple of other folks who wrestled with this..
http://www.markme.com/teammmflash/archives/005316.cfm (last comment)
http://www.flashsupport.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1133 (post from dj_roeeze - note that he found that getting a different version of the FP fixed it.. )

Once I un-install the debug Player and install the standard Player my SetVariable code works just fine in IE, Netscape, or Firefox 1.0.  Wee.. 

If this isn’t the case.. and you are able to get SetVariable to work with the debug version of the Flash Player while using Firefox 1.0.. please comment.

((note.. see my comment from April 26th for a solution))

Can someone explain this or confirm it as a bug?

If I set my English Windows XP system (with English keyboard) to the following
settings (via Start>Control Panel>Regional and Language
Settings>Languages>Details):
Input Language:  German
Keyboard Layout:  German

and then open the On-Screen Keyboard
(Start>Programs>Accessories>Accessibility>On-Screen Keyboard) it shows the
German keyboard map.  I can click on the little keys/buttons and type things in
German in Notepad.  Everything looks ok to me..

Then....  I go here:  http://oddhammer.com/tutorials/german.html
I can type things in the input box and the German characters show up fine.  All
of the characters including ? can be typed and show up correctly.

BUT String.fromCharCode(Key.getAscii()) does not accurately duplicate the last
character typed.  It acts as though the shift key was never pressed.  So I
can’t seem to use getCode() or getAscii() to programmatically detect the “?”
character if my input and keyboard are set to German even though it’s showing
up correctly in the input box when I type it.

And.. naturally when my Input Language and Keyboard Layout are set back to
English it all works just fine.. 

I can’t imagine that this is a bug in the Flash Player.. otherwise somebody would have found it long ago.  ?