HTML Coding
Animating Your Web Page
By Laura Lemay
As a kid, I had a picture book with little characters in the corner of every right-hand page. After reading the book a number of times, I realized that each little character was slightly different than the one before it. Finally, I figured out that if you flipped the pages fast enough, the characters actually appeared to move. The book was an animation. While the story on the pages was interesting, it was the animation that most impressed me. Twenty-five years later, I would be almost as deeply impressed by pretty much the same thing. Only this time it, would be smack in the middle of a Web page.
Animation has become commonplace on the Web, and can be a very useful tool in Web-page design. When used well, animations can illustrate a point, highlight a section that needs particular attention by the reader, or just make a page more visually interesting.
Like many other Web-page design features, however, animation can also be abused. Animations attract attention, often away from the actual content of the page. The more things moving, blinking, or changing color on a page, the more difficult it is to read that page. If you decide to use animation on your own Web pages, resist the urge to scatter animations everywhere.
Having taken care of this token Dire Warning, let's talk about how to create animation. There are several different ways, each of which has advantages and disadvantages, such as the need for a specific browser, extra plug-in software, or special tools. In this column, I'll describe three of the most popular ways to create animations: animated GIFs, Java animations, and animation using Shockwave.<>
