Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS5 Bible

Chapter 25. Inserting Flash Elements

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Getting to know Flash

• Using Flash in Dreamweaver

• Editing Flash movies

• Inserting a Shockwave movie

Animated splash screens, sound-enabled banners, button bars with special fonts, and other exciting Web elements are often built with Adobe's Flash. Flash combines vector graphics and streaming audio into great-looking, very-low-bandwidth files that can be viewed in a browser using the Flash Player plugin. Flash's vector graphics have also turned out to be just the thing for Web-based animations. Beginning with version 4, Flash gained its own scripting language, ActionScript, and added MP3 compression to its streaming audio. Over later versions, Flash morphed into a solid application platform, with player implementations in cell phones, handheld devices, and even billboards. With a huge base of installed Web-based players — as of this writing, well over 90 percent of browsers can view basic Flash content — Flash is an excellent way to liven up a Web page.

As you might expect, Adobe makes it easy to incorporate Flash files into your Dreamweaver projects. All these formats have special objects that provide control over nearly all their parameters through the Property inspector — and each format is cross-browser compatible by default. To take full advantage of the enhanced graphics potential of Flash you need to understand the various parameters available to each format. In addition to covering this material, this chapter shows you how to use ...