Lighthouse - Between GIFs and Shockwave

David Walker

Web site design advice, with an emphasis on good design, no-code web-page tools and the creation of text-intensive pages. Include reviews of Web tools and links to other reviews. Much of this material is published in regular columns in one of Australia's leading newspapers, The Age.

Three problems, one solution

It can fill Web sites with colour, sound and movements in files of less than 20 kB. You can use it without a computer science degree. It's supported by one of the Web's most popular plug-ins. And for just $A325, any Web developer can put it on a Windows 95 486 or 68040 Mac with 16MB of RAM.

With specifications like that, Macromedia's Flash 2 looks like the answer to a Web developer's dream. It isn't, quite - but we'll come to that later. For the moment, understand that Flash solves not one but three problems on today's Web.

Firstly, Flash is built on the idea of vector graphics - pictures made up of lines rather than individual photograph-type pixels of the bitmap images which dominate the Web. Today's Web browsers automatically read two bitmap formats, JPEG and GIF, and the GIF format allows crude animations. But the Web cries out for a vector graphics standard, especially one which provides for animations.

Here's why. The JPEG- or GIF-format images read by your Web browser effectively specify the location, color and brightness of each pixel on the screen in turn. A vector-based format like Flash's will simply specify the four corners of a square, and then tells your computer to connect the dots and fill the square with a particular color or gradation of color. Vector graphics generally pack themselves into far fewer bytes, so they load more quickly over today's Internet connections. Better still, a vector graphic or animation which fills the screen will create the same-sized file as one which sits in a corner. That means Web developers can stop concentrating on the pinched, shrunken, static bitmaps which they usually produce.

But as well as being a vector graphics platform, Flash builds in two other benefits Web developers have been seeking - seamless, browser-independent interactivity and sound. You can add a WAV- or AIFF- format sound file and schedule it to start playing at whatever point you want in the presentation. You can also create buttons and other mouse-clickable images which change colour and make sounds when you hit them, and which trigger new graphics and animations.

And it works

The results can astonish. Anything non-photographic, anything that looks like it could be part of a cartoon, works wonderfully well. And even bitmap images such as photographs can be used to great effect as backgrounds. Text flies in, images loom up into the frame, new pictures load and new sounds play as your mouse travels across the stream.

The Flash 2 program delivers usable tools for creating these results. Built-in (if crude) drawing tools allow you to avoid buying a separate drawing program; animations are created on a timeline. Create the first and last frame of a smooth movement, and the program will fill in the frames in between. And thanks to a generally understandable interface and an excellent interactive tutorial, you can learn Flash in an afternoon. That leaves it a world away from Macromedia's more sophisticated, ultra-pricey Director 6.0, whose Swahili-like scripting language deters most beginners. Right now, the excellence of Flash's content-creation tools puts it in the lead in the Web multimedia contest.

But ...

So do you go ahead and buy Flash as the Next Big Thing? Not so fast. Flash files only play for your Web site visitors if they install a small plug-in, available from www.macromedia.com. The Flash plug-in is now also integrated into Macromedia's widely-distributed Shockwave plug-in - so with time, a decent minority of your audience will be able to see Flash files. But right now, that audience is limited. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Netscape are pushing their own Web animation standards in the form of Dynamic HTML.

In an ideal world, one or both of the browser giants would build in Flash support, giving the Web vector graphics, interactive multimedia and seamless all at once. Instead, analysts like Forrester's John McCarthy reckon that the Web's fierce evolutionary battle could see the browser giants and their Dynamic HTML drive Flash from prosperity to near-extinction in the next 18 months - no matter how good it is.