Formatting text with Cascading Style Sheet styles 433
} else {
trace("Unable to load CSS file.");
}
};
styles.load(css_url);
8.
Save the file as news_html.fla in the same directory that contains the CSS file you
created in step 3.
9. Select Control > Test Movie to see the styles applied to the HTML text automatically.
Using styles to define new tags
If you define a new style in a style sheet, that style can be used as a tag, in the same way as you
would use a built-in HTML tag. For example, if a style sheet defines a CSS style named
sectionHeading, you can use <sectionHeading> as an element in any text field associated
with the style sheet. This feature lets you assign arbitrary XML-formatted text directly to a
text field, so that the text is automatically formatted using the rules in the style sheet.
For example, the following style sheet creates the new styles
sectionHeading, mainBody,
and
emphasized:
.sectionHeading {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 18px;
display: block
}
.mainBody {
color: #000099;
text-decoration: underline;
font-size: 12px;
display: block
}
.emphasized {
font-weight: bold;
display: inline
}
You could then populate a text field associated with that style sheet with the following XML-
formatted text:
<sectionHeading>This is a section</sectionHeading>
<mainBody>This is some main body text,
with one <emphasized>emphatic</emphasized> word.
</mainBody>
NOTE
In this ActionScript, you are loading the text from an external file. For information on
loading external data, see Chapter 15, “Working with Images, Sound, and Video.”