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September 22, 2005
Why a Flash RSS Reader Won't Work
FlashInsider is hosting a contest to see who can "whip up the coolest Flash-based RSS reader". I have done some Flash development as a hobby and a few months ago I actually spent some time investigating how a Flash-based RSS reader would work. I got pretty far with it, but eventually hit a brick wall with how the mx.controls.TextArea component renders HTML.
To be candid this component does a very poor job with handling HTML. I noticed this with how it renders the HTML that was included in a couple RSS feeds: Engadget and ironically in Christophe Coenraets' weblog. These two feeds are important for two reasons. 1) Handling the Engadget feed is part of the contest and 2) Christophe is an employee of Macromedia and apparently wrote the aggregator that manifests the problem.
You can see the problem on CC's weblog by clicking this link, scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking "Try It" under the Flex Blog Reader application. From CC's weblog click the entry entitled, "A Draggable, 'Minimizable/Maximizable', Configurable Panel Class". Note that after selecting that entry every other entry that you select has bullets; these bullets aren't in the original feed, but the TextArea component goes berserk after rendering this snippet of HTML.
My experience with rendering the item/description elements in the Engadget RSS feed was even worse! Images were flying every were, and the text was very poorly formatted. It will be interesting to see if someone comes up with a good solution to this problem (which, in summary, is being able to handle RSS feeds in the wild where you are never sure what you are going to get, even with a "structured" format). If they do it will certainly be with a heavily customized TextArea component or something completely new.
One last interesting thing to note. Flash runs in a browser that is built primary to render HTML; so for the TextArea component to really be able to handle HTML robustly, it would need to essentially act as a browser inside of a Flash movie that runs in a browser. Another option is to simply not masquerade as a component that can handle HTML.
p.s. I hope someone proves me wrong here and delievers something very cool!
Posted by harris at September 22, 2005 12:01 AM
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