Flash

Flash is a technology for making animation effects on web pages. The effects are based on one or a few images which are moved, resized or faded to create animation-like effects. This requires much less bandwidth than a real movie that has to be downloaded frame by frame. The result is that you can create quite impressive animation effects that work even on fairly slow Internet connections. Special software is needed in the client end in the form of a plug-in to the browser. Such plug-ins are available for free for many common browsers and operating systems, and most Internet users have this installed, possibly without knowing it. But of course you cannot assume that all users can see your flash animations.

The Flash system is proprietary, owned by Macromedia. You need special software for designing the Flash animations.

While animated web pages can be impressive, they can also be extremely annoying. The user may not have the patience to wait for your 'movie' to finish if he is just looking for some specific information. See the animation page.

This page was last modified 2008-Dec-08