It's funny you mention that. In flash, text can be formatted with simple HTML markups for styling (tags like <bold>, etc..). It also uses CSS styling for components, although it's a fairly limited form of CSS.

The AIR runtime already has an HTML component*. All Adobe would need to do is stick it into the flash runtime and you could make it work with Flex :)

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/controls/HTML.ht... )

Cool idea!