CSS3 transitions have some significant limitations that make them unworkable for a serious animation platform. They don’t provide precise controls over the timing or easing. They’re great for simple effects but the GreenSock Animation Platform delivers extremely precise rendering, so you can do things like pause() and reverse() an animation anytime or skip to a specific time and play from there, etc. Try creating a CSS3 transition that uses an elastic.out or slow motion ease and then jump to 0.72494-seconds into a 2-second transition and pause() only to resume() later. It’s impossible from what I understand. So no, the platform doesn’t make use of CSS3 transitions. However, it is highly optimized for performance. See the detailed cage match where GSAP battles CSS3 transitions where there’s a detailed comparison in several categories.

The first parameter of the various loaders (ImageLoader, XMLLoader, SWFLoader, MP3Loader, etc.) accepts either a simple String URL or a URLRequest. So if you want to pass data to the server, simply construct a URLRequest accordingly, like:

var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.yourDomain.com/whatever.php");
var data:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
data.exampleSessionId = new Date().getTime();
data.exampleUserLabel = "label1";
request.data = data;
request.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader(request, {name:"image1"});