Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 35. The Flash Platform

—by Todd Marks

Flash has come a long way since its infancy as FutureSplash in the late 1990s. “Flash” started as means of adding animation and interaction to a web page, but has since evolved into a robust platform. Flash has seen significant improvements in not only its content delivery capabilities, including the addition of video and an object-oriented programming language, but also in its ability to allow for live communications and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) development. At the core of these features is the real hero of it all, the Flash Player .

The Flash Player allowed Flash to take off on the Web due to its small plug-in size and use of vector graphics and reusable shapes . Vector graphics were a big improvement over traditional raster graphics, because they were typically much smaller in file size and allowed users to animate graphics easier. The Flash Player’s and Flash files’ biggest contribution, however, was that they brought reusable graphical shapes to the Web. Flash allows graphics, buttons, and code objects to be duplicated over and over in a Flash file, but without adding additional file size to the page. This shift allowed designers and developers to start creating worlds to explore over the Web, during the pre-broadband era.

The name “Flash” traditionally has referred to the Macromedia Flash authoring environment , which produces .swf files, and the Macromedia Flash Player, which plays those files on the Web. Now, the name ...