Introduction

Vectors on the Web! That was the early promise and excitement of Flash, back when the Internet was expanding exponentially and suddenly everybody wanted a "Web presence, filled with color and motion." Macromedia Flash gave Web designers an efficient way to send artwork and animation over the limited-bandwidth connections that most viewers had. Plus it offered a full set of natural-style drawing tools for creating graphic content and animating it. Another Flash advantage was its easy scripting for adding interactivity.

Ultimately, Flash's efficiency at feeding graphics through the Internet's bandwidth constrictions attracted Web-content developers seeking to create complex interactive and data-driven sites, developers who were more knowledgeable about complex coding and scripting. With each new generation of the product, as Web developers push the boundaries of Flash's interactive capabilities, Macromedia has responded by increasingly exposing the inner workings of Flash through ActionScript and the JavaScript API. Today, ActionScript is a full-fledged scripting language, and Flash is a tool designed to address the needs not only of designers who want to create beautiful, low-bandwidth artwork and animation, but also of developers who want to create robust multimedia Internet applications quickly.