I'm an expert at Flash, though I usually only spend an hour on a single project if not two (as my other name QC). I hope that providing information about Flash to make it less intimidating and allowing more people to appreciate its use so I will try to come up with a few posts now and then about Flash.

HTML is ideal for establishing static (non-interactive) websites where text and images are placed at fixed positions. But it doesn't truly support dynamic sites, where text, images, and animations are moving around on the screen. Customarily, these effects were achieved with animated GIF images or java applets but the trouble is that GIF and applets take too much memory and can only express a minimal amount of what the artist/user would prefer. Before we move on to actual examples of Flash movies, we will evaluate Flash to both animated GIFs and java applets.

An animated GIF is several images saved in one. When the animated GIF is loaded onto a webpage, the browser merely loops the images. This means, if you make an animation of a mummy that moves his leg up and down in 20 small movements, then the animated area of the image is saved 20 times. So it doesn't take a lot of animation to create a GIF image that's remarkably larger than a regular mummy image. Therefore, even small animations take forever to load.

While animated GIFs can be used for animations, they do not support interactivity. They only loop images in a predefined order and that's it. In Flash, you can manage the animations. For example, you can make the animation stop and wait for the user to click a button. And when the animation starts again it can be dependant on which button was clicked. A last obvious difference is that GIF images are restricted to a 256-color palette. So compared to animated GIFs, the advantages of Flash are that:

* Flash movies load more rapidly and carry less memory for the same image.

* Flash movies allow interactivity.

* Flash movies can use more than 256 colors.