Effective Web Animation: Advanced Techniques for the Web with Other, 1st edition
Authors: J. Scott Hamlin
Venue:  (1999)

From the Book:In many ways, animation's importance to Web design could be seen from the moment the <blink> tag was introduced on the Web. Early netizens will recall the swift adoption, and abuse, of the <blink> tag throughout the Web. Although it was a visual annoyance, its misuse was due to a vast void: The Web lacked movement. To millions of viewers used to seeing motion on a television screen, its absence on the Web has always begged relief. The <blink> tag offered some slight relief to the static world on the Web. Even though its use quickly became tantamount to high treason, it was merely symptomatic of a virtual playground dying for a little action. Fortunately, a then little-known aspect of the GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) formatthe ability to contain multiple frames and display them in a user-defined, timed sequential manneroffered a more robust animation solution for the Web. GIF animation subsequently launched an explosion of motion, bringing accessible motion to the Web page. You didn't need special tools, skills, or even very much imagination. If you had some sort of graphic program and a shareware GIF animation utility you were in business. Furthermore, the animation didn't have to generate anything close to the quality of the work of animation legends such as Walt Disney: in the early days of the Web, if it moved, it was very cool. Over the years, however, Web design has become an increasingly sophisticated profession, and its standards and requirements have become more stringent. During the dawn of Web animation, it was a matter of little consequence if your GIF animation had alarge file size or if the colors were visibly distorted, but today, professional Web design requires svelte animation file sizes with a high degree of color integrity. In fact, the animation requirements of many Web designers go beyond what GIF animation, by itself, can provide. Web designers must now support such things as interactivity, audio, and faster delivery over the Internet. These requirements have led to the development of new Web animation technologies. Web animation has progressed to the point that it would not be feasible for this book to cover each technology to a depth that would make it worthwhile. Instead, this book focuses on the Web animation technologies that are among the more versatile, accessible, and widely used. Specifically, this book deals with professional techniques using GIF, JavaScript, and Macromedia Flash animation. Many of the concepts and techniques covered here apply to a wide range of animation technologies, but in the interest of covering substantial material, this book focuses largely on GIF, JavaScript, and Flash animation. The main purpose of this book is to provide in-depth Web animation techniques with professional Web design requirements in mind. For example, this book goes to great lengths to detail techniques for minimizing the file sizes of animations to reduce the bandwidth load that your animations add to your Web pages. Also, we look at time-saving techniques to streamline the tedious process of creating individual animation frames, giving you more time to make your animations more ambitious and imaginative. I wrote this book because I felt that many valuable bread-and-butter Web animation techniques did not seem to be common knowledge. Many Web designers appear to be using very old techniques and utilities for creating Web animations, particularly GIF animations. I hope that techniques such as those featured in this book will lead to more-sophisticated techniques, perpetuating the growth and viability of high-quality animation on the Web. More than anything, this book attempts to demonstrate that Web animation is no longer the exclusive realm of the Web page hobbyist. There are plenty of techniques that help make even the limited GIF animation a valuable tool on the Web designer's palette, and, with the likes of JavaScript and Flash animation, we are freed from the limitations imposed by the animated GIF. This book covers techniques that you can use to add high-quality motion to the Web without reducing Web access to a crawl. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player