Flash
Tutorial Home>Introduction to Flash
As 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.
Vector graphics
has a number of advantages comparing to raster: it has a
much smaller size, and its size in bytes does not depend on
the size of movie in pixels. You can resize movie window in
course of 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. Special program called Flash Player
transforms the data from .SWF file into graphic output in
your browser. 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. 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 client's
browser does not have playback capability it is
automatically redirected to Macromedia site for downloading
the program (for free, of course). The size of file is
comparable to that of an averagely sized movie. When
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!
:o)
