Animation/Gif
An animated gif is a bitmap format, which means that each
pixel is saved in its location. There are around 256 colours that you can use.
Gifs are good for images with fewer colours, like logos or graphics. A good
feature of a gifs is that they support transparent backgrounds. GIF images are
smaller than pure bitmap files because of compression. They use a type of
lossless compression called LZW, which attempts to make the file smaller
without significantly degrading the image quality. The more times a file is
saved in compressed formatted, the more quality is lost. Some advantages of
animated gifs are that they are relatively small file sizes but can be really
good to use. A disadvantage is if you want to include more colours you have to
use a technique called dithering but this can decrease the file size and can
mean you lose some definition in the imagine.
Computer animations come in all sorts of different formats. A
flash format is a multimedia authoring application that runs animations. Flash
lets you make animations frame by frame and is good for beginners but is also
used in professional work. Flash files are in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash". Quicktime
is a multimedia framework made my apple; it handles various formats of digital
video, picture, sound, panoramic images and interactivity. It was first
launched on Windows XP and has been updated since. Dynamic HTML/DOM/DHTML is a
set of tools that can be used to create interactive elements on a website.
Typically, dynamic HTML combines standard HTML, which is the markup language of
the web, with a scripting language. This allows the website designer to include
variable elements to a webpage that can be changed by the user after the page
has loaded. An example of dynamic HTML is a menu that drops down when the user
hovers over it. DHTML games are also
becoming more popular. Some advantages are large files start to play (stream)
before the entire files downloaded. Using flash allows you to make your website
more interactive with how the user uses it. These can be things from music,
games, videos and animations. Also flash supports all web browsers.
If you are using devices such as an IPhone or a table that does not support
flash, there will be no way to view it. Also if you are using an old version of
Flash, you may need download the latest version in order for it to work.