Dreamweaver® CS3 Bible

Chapter 25. Inserting Flash and Shockwave Elements

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Getting to know Shockwave and Flash

• Using Shockwave and Flashin Dreamweaver

• Applying a Flash element

• Dreamweaver Technique: Building a Flash Interactive Slide Show

• Managing Flash links

• Using Flash buttonsand Flash text

• Creating inline controlsfor Shockwave movies

• Playing Shockwave moviesin frames

• Triggering behaviors from Flash movies

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.

But Flash is not Adobe's only solution for building interactive presentations for the Web. To many Web designers, Shockwave has represented the state of the art in Web interactivity since Adobe (formerly Macromedia) first created the format in 1995. ...