SWF and AMF Technology Center adobe.com/devnet
The SWF file format delivers vector graphics, text, video, and sound over the Internet and is supported by Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR software. Flash Player already reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops and more than 800 million handsets and mobile devices.
SWF File Format Specification adobe.com
- open specification
The SWF (pronounced “swiff ”) file format delivers vector graphics, text, video, and sound over the Internet and
is supported by Adobe® Flash® Player software. The SWF file format is designed to be an efficient delivery
format, not a format for exchanging graphics between graphics editors. It is designed to meet the following
goals:
• On-screen display—The format is primarily intended for on-screen display and supports anti-aliasing,
fast rendering to a bitmap of any color format, animation, and interactive buttons.
• Extensibility—The format is a tagged format, so it can be evolved with new features while maintaining
backward compatibility with earlier versions of Flash Player.
• Network delivery—The format can travel over a network with limited and unpredictable bandwidth. The
files are compressed to be small and support incremental rendering through streaming. The SWF file
format is a binary format and is not human readable like HTML. The SWF file format uses techniques
such as bit-packing and structures with optional fields to minimize file size.
• Simplicity—The format is simple so that Flash Player is small and easily ported. Also, Flash Player
depends upon a limited set of operating system features only.
• File independence—The files display with minimal dependence on external resources such as fonts.
• Scalability—The files work well on limited hardware, and can take advantage of better hardware when it
is available. This ability is important because computers have different monitor resolutions and bit
depths.
• Speed—The graphics described by SWF files render quickly.
• Scriptability—The format includes tags that provide sequences of byte codes to be interpreted by a
stack machine. The byte codes support the ActionScript® language. Flash Player provides a runtime
ActionScript object model that allows interaction with drawing primitives, servers, and features of Flash
Player.
SWF files have the extension .swf and a MIME type of application/x-shockwave-flash.
ActionScript
ActionScript 3.0 is based on ECMAScript, the international standardized programming language for scripting. ActionScript 3.0 is compliant with the ECMAScript Language Specification, Third Edition (ECMA-262). It also contains functionality based on ongoing work on ECMAScript Edition 4, occurring within the Ecma International standards body.
ActionScript Developer's Guide help.adobe.com
ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference help.adobe.com
Adobe ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 Overview adobe.com
The Adobe® ActionScript™ Virtual Machine 2, or AVM2 for short, was designed to execute programs written in the ActionScript 3.0 language.
This document describes the operation of the AVM2 and defines the file formats, data structures, and
instruction formats used by the AVM2.