Bellow you can find a list tags and their attributes that are supported by flash player (and also by flex framework). This list applies to TextArea, TextFields and other controls that are html enabled. Anchor tag () Creates a hypertext link. * href * target Bold tag () Renders text as bold. Break tag () Creates a line break in the text field. Font tag () Specifies a font or list of fonts to display the text. * color * face * size Image tag () Lets you embed external JPEG files, SWF files, and movie clips. * src * id * width * height * align * hspace * vspace * alt Italic tag () Displays the tagged text in italics. List item tag () Places a bullet in front of the text that it encloses. Paragraph tag () Creates a new paragraph. * align * class Span tag () Available only for use with CSS text styles. * class Text format tag () Lets you use a subset of paragraph formatting properties of the TextFormat class within HTML text fields. * blockindent * indent * leading * leftmargin * rightmargin * tabstops Underline tag () Underlines the tagged text. Some aspects need to be known… and are not supported by flash player and any of the two tags are rendered as bullets. As you already noticed the tags do no comply with new standards, they do not necessarily close as is should and tags without closing do not have /> at the end. More info about this is on Adobe Livedocs following thisLink : http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/mx2004/main_7_2/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=Flash_MX_2004&file=00001040.html