Flash for Rich Internet Applications? I think not. (rant)
Follow-up to Flash project notes from [Ux]
Bug: HTML entities not rendering correctly
This is frustrating…it transpires that Flash has abysmal HTML entity support (a handful of basic types); no workarounds other than pre-processing entities into something it will read (e.g. unicode), but it would be a major exercise to create a conversion engine and an item parser, so I guess that’s that for display of asian characters within the item generator, and possibly for the whole idea.
Macromedia make much of Flash 7 being the tool for building Rich Internet Applications, yet there’s so much missing functionality that is simply just ‘there’ in a browser: if Flash won’t natively support what is standard HTML how the hell can we build RIAs that use XML feeds using standardised encoding?! And why do I have to explicitly ‘capture’ a key event, then convert and map the damn thing before I can find out if the user pressed Enter?! And the final nail in the coffin…my Actionscripted movie was a tidy 41Kb until I added single UI listBox; now it’s 110Kb. As Charlie Cordova says, expecting users to take that sort of hit on download time might seem trivial in a broadband age, but when you can recreate the same thing in a browser with a single <select> tag, it’s a bit much. 
