Well I have decided I want to get into flash animation, and I've been searching the net and can't seem to find the answer. I know flash has symbols and keyframes, but does it support skeleton structure? Where you have a bone structure and you place objects on the bones and move the character with the bones to create an animation, similar to how most 3D authoring programs work.
Flash doesn't support this, and it's used very rarely in 2d animation (almost never), mainly because it wouldn't suit most animations. 2D animation is usually a sequence of drawings of 3D objects like people or buildings etc, and those things don't move as segments on a 2d plane. However there are programs that can do bone animation in 2D, such as Moho (http://www.lostmarble.com/moho.html), and you can make some decent enough things if you work with the restrictions, and are happy with the overall effect it gives (kind of like paper puppets). It exports to swf.
I don't know. I've never tried it, but I've read something about skeletal animation in Flash. Still, I use Flash a lot and I gotta say I've never seen any trace of it. But in any case, it's completely possible to do it manually by just embedding graphic's or movieClip's in the correct hierarchy. The problem with this approach is how to control it. You'd need to control each element independently in it's own timeline at the correct main timeline time. It is totally doable if you're able to plan and time your animation well in advance.