Animating Your Web Pages With DirectAnimation
DirectAnimation's Wizards Provide Relief from Coding
By Rick Dobson
DirectAnimation is a subset of Microsoft's DirectX Media product, a family of high-level APIs and multimedia controls offering animation, streaming content delivery, and integration of multimedia data types. DirectAnimation offers HTML, scripting, and language hooks into its graphics toolkit. Because it offers both high- and low-level approaches, DirectAnimation serves different types of Web experts (from creative professionals to application developers) in need of a graphics toolkit.
This article covers the basics of creating engaging graphics on Web pages using DirectAnimation. I'll introduce the DirectAnimation Wizards, which let you create graphic controls without any programming. These wizards automatically generate HTML that you can cut and paste into your favorite HTML editor. Advanced application developers can also benefit from the wizards since they can quickly see the behavior of design-time settings for graphic controls. Later in this story I'll discuss each of four multimedia controls, along with selected methods and properties that determine their appearance on a Web page.
Touring DirectAnimation
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DirectAnimation runtime engine ships as an integrated component of Internet Explorer 4.0 (IE 4). Content authors can implement DirectAnimation effects through Dynamic HTML (DHTML).
