Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Showing Off with Multimedia

In This Chapter

• Understanding multimedia

• Creating Flash buttons and text within Dreamweaver

• Adding Flash files to Web pages

• Comparing audio and video formats

• Inserting multimedia files

• Introducing Java

• Linking to PDF files

Get your Web pages singing and dancing with multimedia. Audio, video, and animation are exploding on the Web and transforming static pages into rich multimedia experiences. You can use Dreamweaver to link to multimedia files, or you can insert audio, video, and other files so that they play within your pages. You can even control when and how they play for your users.

Not all Web sites warrant multimedia; if your goal is to provide information in the fastest way possible to the broadest audience, text is still generally the best option. If you want to provide a richer experience for your users, to show rather than just tell, or to entertain as well as inform, adding sound, video, and animation can help you share more information more vividly and even make you look more professional.

The most complicated aspect of multimedia on the Web is choosing the best format for your audience, which is why you'll find a primer on audio and video formats in this chapter. You can't create or edit multimedia files in Dreamweaver; but after your files are optimized and ready for the Internet, Dreamweaver makes it relatively easy to add them to your Web pages.

As you discover in this chapter, inserting video, audio, and Flash files is similar to adding ...