In this chapter we learn to link to third party publishers of XML content. Our goal is to acquire and manipulate content in XML format from outside of our own domain.

The first step in doing this will be to cheat past the inhibitions that Flash places on contact with others. We will do that by creating a proxy service running on our own server but making contact with the external servers that Macromedia has put off limits for us.

Once we have created a dataflow from those servers to our Flash program, we need to understand the data. There are many popular XML formats for sharing information. We will review these standards and peek at the communities that have been developing around them. In particular, we’ll examine in depth RSS, a simple standard with several constituencies.

The techniques in this chapter are interesting and the world that they open up is a utterly astonishing. If you have not yet been exposed to the living network of XML information circulating through the Internet, get ready! Even in its immaturity, this flow of organized information is like an avalanche in a library.