Dreamweaver CS5.5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. 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 14), Dreamweaver effects and behaviors (Chapter 15), 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 16-1) 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, provides amazingly fast and smooth web animation, and complex visual interaction.

Flash: An Introduction

A few years ago, if you wanted to add smooth animation, slideshows, or other high-quality interactive effects to a web page, Flash was the only game in town. Thanks to the Flash plug-in (available in most web browsers), web developers could use the Flash authoring program to make “movies” that played inside the browser, and add programming logic to make those movies respond to visitor feedback—mouse movement, clicks, and keyboard input. However, the JavaScript programming language and the speedy JavaScript engines in modern browsers ...