Question

I know very little about Flash, and so is not programming in it. I have a website in PHP, and obviously, HTML, CSS, JS, etc.

What I want to do is to allow users to full-screen certain pieces of the DOM. So my question is, is there any way to wrap flash around certain portions of the DOM dynamically in order to allow full screening of that portion.

Edit:

The current responses are very interesting and could be the only options.

But in my ideal world there would be an embedded flash object, and inside that would be some sort of iframe or the flash equivalent so that the rendering is still handled by the browser and not flash itself.

Answer 1

Flash is very limited to what HTML it can render by itself ( bold,italic,underline, a, ul, li and img I think are the only tags supported ) in the Flash Player. AIR renders full HTML, but that won’t help you at all.

You could try and use an html parser. I didn’t spent to much time with html in flash, so I don’t know which parser does the best job. Here’s one that looks ok-ish:

http://code.google.com/p/htmlsprite/

Once you have your html rendered in flash properly, the rest is easy peasy.
Assuming fullscreen would be your fullscreen button.

fullscreen.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenClicked);

function fullscreenClicked(event:MouseEvent):void{

switch(stage.displayState) {
                case StageDisplayState.NORMAL:
                    stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
                    break;
                case StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN:
                default:
                    stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.NORMAL;
                    break;
            }
            trace('stage.displayState: ' + (stage.displayState));

}

As Krish stated, don’t forget to set allowFullScreen to true in both embed and object tags. Also, you can only test in the browser, not in the IDE.