The graphic animation on the Internet is made up of all those moving images that you observe when displaying a web page. When these images are small and occupy only part of the display area of web pages, they are most likely animated GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), which are nothing more than a sequence of images that give the appearance of movement. The time it takes to download these images is certainly much longer than a motionless image. When the graphic animation is more sophisticated and reaches the dimension of the total page viewing area, creating a global environment of moving images and a graphic navigation menu, it is then a web page developed with Flash, which is the technology we want to focus our attention on in this article.
Adobe flash
Combining fast-deploying vector graphics with a drag-and-drop interface, Flash has earned the preference of many professional Web site developers, indisputably the quintessential software for adding interactive animation to sites. It is the leading product in this market. Flash is a very popular software commercialized by Macromedia, which is used to create animation programs on the Internet based on graphic vectors, using a full-screen navigation interface, which produces files in SWF (Shock wave flash file format) format small enough to flow through a standard modem connection via telephone. The software, currently version 7, has become a standard on the Web, due to its speed and the smooth and easy way to present graphics. Disney, Volkswagen, Citibank, The New York Times, Cisco, Coca-Cola and IBM are some of the thousands of companies that use, or have used, Flash to display graphic animation without sacrificing response times. Introduced in 1996, Flash was originally called Future Splash Animator and was created by FutureWave, a software developer in San Diego, California, USA. It was given the name Flash when Macromedia acquired it in 1997. Flash can turn the web into a medium capable of communicating through visual and auditory messages, with highly interactive content, as long as the visitor has the corresponding software to execute the programming developed in Flash.
When to use Flash Flash is certainly an amazing medium, however there are other options to convey a message. When we select Flash to create the content of our Website we must be sure that the characteristics of this medium satisfy our communication needs. For example, Flash is not an appropriate tool in case the content is simply a long text document like the one you are currently reading. The Flash facilities are not intended to publish this type of content. Marketing experts agree that Flash is an excellent medium for publishing what they call "high impact" Web sites. While this term sounds good, it certainly doesn't tell us precisely what Flash is for on the Internet.
Specifically, Flash is the medium par excellence when the following factors are highly relevant to the project:
• Animation
• Sound
• Precise visual control over graphic elements
• A high level of compatibility with various browsers
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