Ever since I initially dove headfirst into the shallow end of the pool that is standards-based Web design a couple of years ago, I've endured a love-hate relationship with CSS. I love the flexibility and simplicity of offloading page styles to an external document, but hate the varying ways in which today's modern browsers interpret my intentions. That's where so-called "bad" CSS comes in, and one set of tricks in particular has become an oasis in my quest to get closer to the elusive "pixel-accurate" promise of CSS.

Believe it or not, we've come a long way. Fresh off our triumphant first script from last time, we're going to follow up today with a more casual discussion of such vague and jelly-like concepts as properties, operators, types, and functions. I'm going to try to make all this stuff as clear (and fun, if that's even possible) as I can, because although it's somewhat dry material, it's crucial stuff to (at least partially) grasp if you want to take the next step and start writing truly useful ActionScript.

As I dive deeper and deeper into Flash 8 Pro, a few things are starting to stand out as "stealth" features, meaning that while not exactly highly touted, they are proving themselves highly useful. One such feature is 9-slice scaling (AKA Scale-9), which, judging by its various names, would seem to refer to some sort of scaling and/or slicing. So what exactly is Scale-9, and just how "highly useful" could it possibly be?

When we left off, we had just gotten our simple setup moved over to Layout. Today, we have just a couple of chores left to do before our scene is ready to light, and then we'll get to the much-delayed promise of setting up radiosity to help hide the fact that the scene is so gawdawful in the first place. Let's dive right back in, shall we?

After last episode's short detour, we're back on track. Now, all the talk about targeting way back in part 2 was the equivalent of taking the scenic route (long way around, lot more to see), but I hope that exercise gave you a sense of where instances of symbols "live" in relation to each other and how to start thinking about those relationships (an exercise which certainly wasn't a waste of time in terms of where we're going with this). Today, though, we'll explore a much easier way to target objects and (finally!) write our first official script.

It's been quite a while since the last installment of this series, in which I offered up some tips on faking radiosity to help add a bit of realism while cutting down on render times. But what happens if the opposite is true, and you have a project where setup time needs to be kept to a minimum and render time doesn't matter? In addition to being a beautiful, photorealistic way of rendering scenes in LightWave, radiosity can also serve as a virtual dab of Clearasil by covering up blemishes when budgets are tight.

Sixteen months. That's how long it's been since part 2 of this series, which, for the curious, happened to be a whirlwind tour of how to target symbols in Flash. While there was a good reason for this protracted absence (I was insanely busy and not writing anything for a year), it's still been WAY too long between installments. Today, all that gets rectified (I hope), provided you can get over the not-entirely-small fact that I'm going to renege on what I promised we were going to do last time. How's that for a page turner?

When we last left off, we were knee-deep in the creation of our masterpiece cross-platform Projector in Director MX 2004, one that consists of a single button that launches a PDF file. Exciting stuff, to be sure, but we're only halfway there. Join me as we continue our journey, this time as we venture outside the cozy confines of DMX04 and into the equally exciting world of moving files and manipulating text documents. And with a buildup like that, how could you not be breathless with anticipation?

If you're reading this now, you either 1) bought into the whole "you should really be using ActionScript even though you're a designer" schpiel I outlined in our last installment, or 2) are here as a result of some sort of freak accident. Either way, today we're going to embark on the second leg of our journey into the strange and wonderful world of ActionScript, this time focusing on object targeting by examining how Flash keeps track of stuff behind the scenes.

It's been quite some time (six months, which might as well have been during the Nixon administration) since the first installment of this series, so there's no time like the present to press on with our whirlwind tour of various lighting features in LightWave. Today, we're going to go through a fairly simple technique that can add a hint of radiosity to your scenes without the usual associated rendering hit. Intrigued? Of course you are. So let's begin...