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frame loaded. Soon after, the animated GIF was born, effectively packing the GIF frame sequence into one file which downloaded once. The animated GIF has been a staple of ad banners and simple attentiongrabbing effects ever since. Even sites which promote and showcase Flash and Shockwave interfaces still use animated GIFs because designers know that it39。s summarise them anyway. GIFs are bitmap images, so e at a fixed size regardless of browser window size. They can reach quite exciting sizes if they include more than 10 frames or so, because pression is based on the number of different colours in each image. They also tend to appear in a jerky fashion during the download, leaving the user staring at a seemingly inexplicable sequence running at one frame every five seconds the first time round. More recently, designers have been able to produce basic path motion for static images using DHTML. Instead of running an animation in one fixed place, DHTML techniques let you take a single image and move it around over the top of your page as an independent, floating object. The nice thing about this approach is that the animation, for what it is, starts almost immediately and the movement is perfectly smooth, not being framebased. The graphic can also have a transparent background just like any GIF. The big drawback is that it doesn39。s not really animation. While the World Wide Web Consortium squandered most of the 1990s considering some proper animation technologies, Macromedia just went for it. The result was Flash, a system of playing back selfcontained movies containing vectorbased graphics and text within a Web page or independently running in a Web browser. The advantages of the Flash approach are considerable, and getting more pelling as time goes on. In the first instance, the vector nature of Flash movies allows you to include quite plex graphics and sequences in the confidence that they39。ll find that Flash files are smaller than animated GIFs and load up faster than Java actions. Vectors also mean that the movies can resize themselves automatically to fit the browser screen, antialiasing on the fly. Better still, Flash movies can incorporate events and react to user input, making it terrific for developing custom Web page interfaces which HTML couldn39。s point of view, the movies can be set to start running as soon as the download mences without waiting for it to plete. There are two principal drawbacks to the Flash format. First, it requires your audience to have a plugin Flash player installed. However, to Macromedia39。s that Flash isn39。t matter that Flash isn39。re