XHTML + E4X + Namespaces September 19, 2008

Namespaces in flash are cool and...pretty pesky.

• for unknown reasons, querying a E4X's queries in the same block apparently have to be individually namespaced. Neither putting the default namespace in the class or function worked.
• anything that tries to get at the xml while it's being passed around has to have a copy of the namespace. This isn't particularly efficient when you are serializing between objects and XHTML.

Steven Sachs has a good tutorial on some of the issues faced when working with XHTML and Flash.  In particular the namespace.  However after losing about 2hrs I've come up with an alternate solution...just stripping the namespace out as it's introducing more code chaos than the namespace would have solved.

In the next rev of kidthing.com's website we are going to XHTML for SEO and CMS, deeplinking etc reasons.   In addition we are consuming Wordpress, initially as RSS and eventually as fully skinning the main pages in Wordpress.  Since Flash's support for HTML is limited we run things through a 'cleaner' that replaces quotes, superscript, some bullets with the appropriately embedded characters.  It was easy to add the following to strip it out on the complete load of the XHTML

res = res.split('xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"').join('');

I switched over from String manipulation to XML manipulation to get at selective DIV's that get mapped to textfields in the flash templates (Flash is like CSS on steroids)  E4X here really shines.