Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Advantages

Many aspects of the Flash file format make it ideal for adding interactive content to web pages:

File sizes are small.

Flash allows for reusable graphics, buttons, and code objects without adding additional bytes for every instance used. Flash movies also use vector graphics, which rely on math to designate lines and color as opposed to storing the colors of individual pixels, such as with raster graphics. This saves a lot of file size.

It is scalable.

Flash images and animations can be resized with no loss of detail, making it easy to fill the whole browser window with a Flash interface without adding to the file size. Flash can be used to create static images, such as maps, where zooming in to view the image in finer detail is desirable.

Image quality is high.

Real-time anti-aliasing smoothes the edges of graphics and text, regardless of the display size. Users can zoom in on vector graphics with no loss of image quality.

It uses streaming technology.

Flash files start playing quickly and continue to play as they download, so they can be pseudostreamed from an HTTP server. The Flash Player itself can stream video and audio, including MPEG and Flash video files.

Integrated audio and video.

Flash is a good way to bring background sound and user-triggered sound effects to a web site. With the advent of Flash MX you can also import files of type .mov (QuickTime), AVI, and .mpg (MPEG), and with the professional version of Flash MX 2004, you can edit and crop the video before adding ...