The key point is
that CSS in Flex is not principally used to control the layout of the design (this is done through MXML).
Instead, CSS is a quick and effective way to change the look of your components and application overall.
You can define many features of the components through CSS, including colors, fonts, corner
rounding, and alpha gradients. Changing these features using CSS modifies your design so that it does
not have a default look.
The Flex Style Explorer is an effective way to alter the CSS for a Flex application, but you can also create
the CSS by typing it into a CSS file. Of course, even if you create the CSS through the Style
Explorer, you can still modify it by hand if necessary. In the next chapter, we??™ll look at view states.
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STYLING
What we??™ll cover in this chapter:
Creating different view states
Creating multiple CSS styles for multiple components
Using absolute layout
Files used in this chapter:
PersonalPage.zip (completed project)
style.css
small1.png
small2.png
headshot.png
So far the projects that we have built have been based on having a single page. The
Atom Reader brought data in dynamically but showed all of its content at once. With
a normal HTML page, showing other information would be done by loading a new
page into the browser. In a Flash project, you would show other information
by jumping to a different place in the timeline. Since Flex has no timeline (which can
get problematic on larger projects) and we want to avoid having page reloads, we
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WORKING WITH STATES
Chapter 3
bring in new pages by changing the state of the Flex project.
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