I love DENG

In 2002, Claus Wahlers started a project called DENG to attempt to render standards-based HTML inside of Flash. At this time, ActionScript 1 was still in full swing and, until recently, has stayed that way. I talked to him a few weeks ago, and he is working on a new version in ActionScript 3. Of course, he talks about the speed increases as being incredible, but I hope this isn't going to take 5 more years. In AS1, he has support for almost full CSS3 (which none of the browsers yet do), XHTML, SVG, XForms, XFrames, and a little SMIL. This is out of this world and I wish him all the luck fixing this stuff up; I wish I had more time to help him out.

SMIL, for the people who don't know, is a W3C standard markup language created and used by the video player companies who put out things like QuickTime and Real Player. It is much like Fuse, except in markup form, and has way more features. Basically, it is a language to create animations in a linear fashion, interactively --and it's wicked powerful. I would love to one day have something like this in Flash.