Cascading Style Sheets and text

Cascading Style Sheets are a mechanism for creating text styles that can be applied to HTML or XML documents. A style sheet is a collection of formatting rules that specify how to format HTML or XML elements. Each rule associates a style name, or selector, with one or more style properties and their values. For example, the following style defines a selector named bodyText.

bodyText { text-align: left}

You can create styles that redefine built-in HTML formatting tags used by Flash Player (such as <p> and <li>), create style "classes" that can be applied to specific HTML elements using the <p> or <span> tag's class attribute, or define new tags.

You use the TextField.StyleSheet class to work with text style sheets. You can load styles from an external CSS file or create them natively using ActionScript. To apply a style sheet to a text field that contains HTML- or XML-formatted text, you use the TextField.styleSheet property. The styles defined in the style sheet are mapped automatically to the tags defined in the HTML or XML document.

Using styles sheets involves three basic steps:

• Create a style sheet object from the TextField.StyleSheet class. See Creating a style sheet object.
• Add styles to the style sheet object, either by importing them from an external CSS file or by defining them with ActionScript. See Loading external CSS files and Creating new styles with ActionScript.
• Assign the style sheet object to a text field that contains XML- or HTML-formatted text. See Applying styles to a TextField object, An example of using styles with HTML, and An example of using styles with XML.