Flash and XML

If you’re not able to see the image above, you don’t have the Flash 6 plugin.

This is nothing fancy. The images (Frink and the Q101 logo), along with all the text are being loaded from an xml file. A small step towards making things more dynamic!

Up until today, I didn’t really understand that XML in and of itself, doesn’t DO anything. It’s just a convenient way to store information that can them be passed on to other applications.

Working through things today, it took me a long while to understand nodes. Particularly, that the text between tags also count as a node. Argh! But when that clicked, I felt really happy that the blasted thing just worked. Right now, my approach is really sloppy (much like the code for this blog). But I’m hoping to learn more about how Flash and XML play together.

Here’s one thing I’m hoping I’m not doing to my students, when I’m writing up tutorials. It seems that technical documentation gets so messy and complicated. Naming things to describe what they really are. Similar terms getting thrown around. Like this:

Access the first child of the first child which is the node represented by the tag. The 0 position of its child nodes array is occupied by the text value of the tag which we retrieve with nodeValue. Using nodeName instead I would get the name of the tag which in this case is “Text”