Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Add Flash and Other Multimedia

As you learned in previous chapters, you can bring your website to life with interactive and animated pages using Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 3), Spry widgets, Dreamweaver effects and behaviors (Chapter 13), and images (Chapter 5). But as you’ve probably seen by now, today’s web pages go even further—they blink, sing, and dance with sound, video, and advanced animation.

You can create these effects too, but you’ll need some outside help. Programs like Flash (see Figure 14-1) let you create and display complex multimedia presentations, such as slick animations, interactive games, and video tutorials.

In this chapter, you’ll learn to embed these media files in your pages, and you’ll see why Flash, a versatile program that lets you both develop and play back multimedia, provides amazingly fast and smooth web animations and complex visual interaction.

Note

Flash isn’t as popular as it once was, and HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript let you do many of the things that were once only possible with Flash—but for the full story, see the box on Is Flash Still Important?.