Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Adding Sound, Video, and Animation

As you learned in previous chapters, you can bring your website to life with interactive and animated pages using Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 3), JavaScript widgets, Dreamweaver effects and behaviors (Chapter 13), and images (Chapter 5). But as you’ve probably seen by now, today’s web pages go even further—they blink, sing, and dance with sound, videos, and display interactive animations. That’s the subject of this chapter.

You’ll start off learning how to use the new HTML5 tags to add audio and video to your web pages. Along the way, you’ll learn about the file formats (also known as containers) that today’s web browsers work with.

For years, Adobe’s Flash program dominated the web universe as the primary way to display complex multimedia presentations, such as slick animations, interactive games, and video tutorials. Flash isn’t the only game in town these days, but it’s still widely used, and you’ll learn how to add Flash animations and video to your site. The heir apparent to Flash is Adobe’s Edge Animate, and you’ll learn how to add Animate creations to your web pages.

Adding Sound to Your Page

There are plenty of reasons to add sound to your web page. Perhaps you have a band to promote and you want to put some of your original songs online. Maybe you run a corporate website and want to include an audio message from the CEO. (He’s not photogenic, so an audio works best.) Or, maybe you’re the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (http://macaulaylibrary.org/ ...