Beginning Adobe® AIR™: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime

3.2. AIR HTML Applications

AIR applications can also be built using traditional web languages like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, and DOM. HTML has been the backbone of the Internet for many years and is something that almost anyone who has even opened a text editor to edit a web page is familiar with. Since AIR has given us the ability to create desktop applications using simple HTML, the size of the possible AIR development community is tremendous. HTML-based AIR applications can use JavaScript to extend the application and give it additional functionality. JavaScript also has the ability to communicate with ActionScript. This gives HTML-based AIR applications enhanced with JavaScript the ability to utilize many of the AIR features without the developer needing to know the ActionScript language.

3.2.1. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

In late 1991, the first public definition of HTLM was made available in a document by Tim Berners-Lee titled, "HTML Tags." It described 22 HTML tags of which 13 still exist today. This very simple markup language gave the early Internet developers everything they needed to format mostly text-based web pages. HTML has grown over the years from the original to HTML 2.0, which was completed in 1995. In 1996, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) became the authority to maintain the HTML standard, and in early 1997, HTML 3.2 was officially published. Not long after that, in late 1997, HTML 4.0 was published, followed by HTML 4.01 in 1999. In 2000, HTML ...