MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004 - ACTIONSCRIPT, Reference Manual

Page: 795 / 816

795
APPENDIX D
Writing Scripts for Earlier Versions of Flash Player
ActionScript has changed considerably with the release of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and
Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004. When you create content for Flash Player 7, you’ll take
advantage of the full power of ActionScript. You can still use Flash MX 2004 to create content for
earlier versions of Flash Player, but you won’t be able to use every ActionScript element.
This chapter provides guidelines to help you write scripts that are syntactically correct for the
player version you are targeting.
About targeting older versions of Flash Player
While writing your scripts, use the Availability information for each element in the ActionScript
dictionary (see
Chapter 12, “ActionScript Dictionary,” on page 205 ) to determine if an element
you want to use is supported by the Flash Player version you are targeting. You can also determine
which elements you can use by displaying the Actions toolbox; elements that are not supported
for your target version are highlighted in yellow.
If you are creating content for Flash Player 6 or Flash Player 7, you should use ActionScript 2.0,
which provides a number of important features that aren’t available in ActionScript 1, such as
improved compiler errors and more robust object-oriented programming capabilities.
For a review of differences in how certain features are implemented when publishing files for
Flash Player 7 versus how the features are implemented in files published for earlier versions of the
player, see
“Porting existing scripts to Flash Player 7” on page 15 .
To specify the player and ActionScript version you want to use when publishing a document,
select File > Publish Settings and then make your selections in the Flash tab. If you need to target
Flash Player 4, see the next section.