Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Flash and Other Multimedia

With Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 4), Spry widgets (Chapter 12), Dreamweaver Effects and Behaviors (Chapter 13), and images (Chapter 6), you can bring your Web pages to life with interactivity and animation. But as you probably have noticed, more and more Web pages these days blink, sing, and dance with sound, video, and advanced animation.

You can create these effects too, but you’ll need outside help from programs like Flash (see Figure 14-1), Director, or the Java programming language, all of which are designed to create complex multimedia presentations. Dreamweaver provides powerful tools for adding these external media files and embedding them into your Web pages.

Four warnings, however. First, while all the technologies discussed in this chapter let you expand your Web pages into new and exciting territory, they also require that your site visitors have external applications (not just a Web browser). These programs, usually called plug-ins, are a bit controversial in the Web development community, mainly because they can limit your audience. Not all Web site visitors have the necessary plug-ins installed on their computers. Those guests must choose from three equally unpalatable options: go to a different Web site to download the plug-in, skip the multimedia show (if you’ve built a second, plug-in–free version of your site), or skip your Web site entirely. All media types in this chapter require a plug-in of some kind; see each section ...