Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Add Flash and Other Multimedia

As you learned in previous chapters, you can bring your website to life with interactivity and animation using Cascading Style Sheets (Chapter 4), Spry widgets (Chapter 13), Dreamweaver effects and behaviors (Chapter 14), and images (Chapter 6). 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 15-1) let you create and display complex multimedia presentations, such as slick animations, interactive games, and video tutorials.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how 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, has become the standard for web animation, complex visual interaction, and what has become known as “Rich Internet Applications,” a fancy way of saying programs that give websites the visual richness and feature set of desktop programs.