flash document_class_maintimeline

As we saw in the chapter entitled “The Display List� the Flash player is made up of a Stage object situated at the top of the display list. When a SWF is read in the player it adds the main timeline of the loaded SWF as a child of the Stage object:

By default the timeline of a SWF is represented by the MainTimeline class. Let’s test it by creating a new Flash CS3 document and placing the following code on the main timeline:

// displays : [object MainTimeline]
trace( this );

We will now see that we aren’t limited to this class.

Worth remembering

• By default the main timeline is represented by the MainTimeline class.