As Macromedia, the developers of the technology state, Flash is the current industry standard for interactive vector graphics and animation on the web.

Interactivity means that a visitor can click on elements of a movie, and the movie will respond accordingly if programmed to do so. It is possible to build the entire site using nothing but Flash.

Benefits of Flash

Vector graphics have a number of advantages compared to raster graphics: they are of a much smaller size, and their size in bytes does not depend on the size of the movie in pixels. You can resize the movie window during playback and this will not result in quality loss as it would with raster animation or video.

However, the price for this is that your visitor has to have corresponding software. A special program called Flash Player transforms the data from a .swf file into graphical output in the browser.

90% Support

Luckily, Flash has been around for long enough to be widely supported. The newest versions of browsers have a built-in Flash Player. If not, the player may be provided by the operating system. Around 90% of computers do display flash content.

The Flash Player

But even if you are unlucky and don't have the player there is still a way out. Flash animation should be embedded into HTML in such a manner that in case the client's browser does not have playback capability it is automatically redirected to Macromedia's site for downloading of the program (free, of course).

The size of the Flash Player file is comparable to that of an averagely sized movie. When the download completes the newly obtained player is put to work smoothly, so that the person using the browser does not even feel the difference. Well, at least, that's the theory!



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Last modified: Sunday, 11-Jul-2004 08:15:56 EDT. Print this page.



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