GIF animation software is widely available in low-cost commercial packages or as shareware. But when people think of animation, they think of movies. It's easy to produce QuickTime movies, and again the software is relatively low-cost. GIF animation and QuickTime both play back sequences of stored images. The viewer's only interaction is to start or stop the sequence, either via direct button control or by exiting a window.
Users can download brower plug-ins to run advanced animation, video and sound programs.
Before you decide to post plug-in animations on your agency's Web site, however, there is something you should remember. Most people won't take the time to install the plug-in, so your animation work will be wasted on them. The situation is very different for plug-ins on your office's intranet, because you know what tools are available to users there. The big gun today in Internet animation is the Java language. Java animations are applets, operating system-independent programs that are transferred from the server to the viewer's computer for playback.