Run AS3 script via html codetag?

Question

From what I know, it is possible to add <a href="....">
or <a href="mailto:..."> in order to set dynamically a
specific substring of a text to do either navigation to other page,
or open to e-mail client. But is it possible to do much more
important things, by just calling an AS3-function?... I am talking
about a hyperlink to AS3 script code, instead to email client /
browser.
I.e. I want to download dynamic text with the names of
Authors of papers from a database, and parse them serial i.e.:
Authors:
Author1Name,
Author2Name, ...,
AuthorKName".
When the user press on a name, to open a vector flash pop-up
(MovieClip) as a data-card of the specific Author. This could be
done if there was an Flash-HTML tag like <a
fref="loadModule(1)">
Author1Name</a>, which would run the
loadModule(1) function of the parent MovieClip that contains
the dynamic text.
I know something like this doesn't exist (
add it to wishlist for future versions! :) ), but is there
any other way to do it, except from creating one Object per author
with MouseEvent listeners and place them dynamically to correct x,y
positions?...

Answer 1

It's as you describe it, with one problem: the "button"
position and size is dynamically text-depending and not known
before the data parsed to screen.
Example:
Create a textField and add inside it a dynamic text like:
"Bill Gates created Microsoft". If this text was static I could add
2 transparency buttons (listening to: MouseEvent.CLICK), one over
"Bill Gates" and one over "Microsoft", where the first would make
visible a movieclip talking about Bill Gates, and the second would
make visible one movieclip talking about Microsoft.
But the text can come as: "Microsoft was created by Bill
Gates", or "There is a company named Microsoft, which was created
by Bill Gates", or "Windows is a software created by Microsoft.
Bill Gates was the one that created Microsoft". Thus you can't have
apriori knowledge on where to put the buttons. In more advanced
examples, I might not know how many buttons I should place also
(i.e. of authors - i don't know apriori how many authors a paper
has).
This is same as in case of hyperlink: We don't know where a
hyperlink can be, thus we place a tag for every hyperlink into the
text that defines that hyperlink position and action.
The only way to overcome this problem (just though of it) is
to create my own tag, and before parse the text to check for that
tag. For every tag to find the starting coordinates of it's inside
text on the parent movieclip (x,y) and the ending coordinates - and
providing that they have the same y-coordinate (no line change), to
create a transparent button at the specific area over the text.
If this is the only way to do it (thus making my own
pseudo-html tag inside flash),
I must know if it is possible to take (x,y) coordinates (in
pixels) of a letter (upperleft corner) in a dynamic textbox.
kglad, do you know if this is possible and how to do it?... (It may
need to open new thread for this)...