What is flash

Description of this vector technology.

Probably one of the most important advances in web design has been the appearance of technology developed by called Flash.

Flash is the most commonly used technology on the Web that enables the creation of vector animations. The interest in the use of vector graphics is that they allow light-weight animations to be carried out, that is, they take a short time to be loaded by the browser.

As you may know, there are two types of charts:

• Vector graphics, in which an image is represented from lines (or vectors) that have certain properties (color, thickness…). The quality of this type of graphics does not depend on the zoom or the type of resolution with which the graphic is being viewed. No matter how close we get, the graphic does not become pixelized, since the computer automatically draws the lines for that level of zoom.
• Bitmap images. This type of graphics resembles a kind of grid in which each of the squares (pixels) shows a certain color. The information of these graphics is saved individually for each pixel and is defined by the coordinates and color of said pixel. These types of graphics are dependent on the variation in size and resolution, and may lose quality when successively modifying their dimensions.

Thus, Flash makes use of the possibilities offered by working with vector graphics, easily resizable and alterable by means of functions, as well as intelligent storage of the images and sounds used in its animations by means of libraries, to optimize the size of the files containing the animations.

This optimization of the space occupied by the animations, combined with the possibility of loading the animation at the same time that it is displayed in the browser (a technique called ), makes it possible to provide visual elements that give life to a website without taking the loading time to do so. of the page is extended to limits unbearable by the visitor.

In addition to this purely aesthetic aspect, Flash introduces the possibility of interacting with the user into its environment. To do this, Flash invokes a programming language called Action Script. Object-oriented, this language has clear influences from Javascript and allows, among many other things, to manage the filling of forms, to execute different parts of an animation based on events produced by the user, to jump to other pages, etc.

In this way, Macromedia puts at our disposal a technology designed to add visibility to our website at the same time that it allows us to interact with our visitor. Of course, it is not the only vector design alternative applied to the Web, but it is undoubtedly the most popular and complete of them.