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nimated 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 stream-
ing 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 independent
controls—both inline and wit ...