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Originally Posted by chris.p
Can you explain to me please the difference between Flash and Actionscript? Are they both a .swf extension? How can you tell between them from a browser view?
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There's not much difference between Flash and Actionscript, Flash is basically just an environment where you draw stuff and set motions whereas Actionscript is the programming language that Flash uses.
If my explanation is not clear, picture Flash as a drawing tool where you can draw circles and other shapes and also tell them to move in spirals or resize themselves or change shape periodically, you can even make a short movie using only Flash and picture Actionscript as the programming language that allows you to click on the shapes you draw or input words or calculate stuff like when you play a tennis game, the game needs to calculate the speed and velocity and angle of the ball you shot or return, as in you program using Actionscript so that Flash knows what it's suppose to do. This may still be not clear or precise as I'm not very good at explaining things.
A .swf file can contain either Flash with Actionscript or Flash without Actionscript. I think pure Actionscript without Flash is also possible.
No, you can't tell the difference between them in browser view just like you can't tell html from css or aspx or php in browser view (assuming you're not looking at the address bar). But for Flash and Actionscript, there is no way you can tell what is used without extracting them to their .fla or any other flash format file used for development (A.K.A the source file).
I think this is the best an amateur Flash developer (a hobby) can explain.