Internet Basics: Flash is Like French Kissing

Ever remember your first kiss? Most of us stumbled into the world of kissing sometime in adolescence without much instruction, if any. Sure, we stumbled, but it was worth it. And eventually we found our way, we hit our stride, and we knew how to kiss.

Then, suddenly, something turned our world upside down – someone laid a French kiss on us. And one thing was for sure – French kissing was kissing, yet different.

That’s what Flash is like.

We probably don’t encounter Flash the first time we browse around on the Web. In fact, most of us get used to good old webpages – how they look, how they react, what they do. And just when we think we got this Web thing figured out – wham! – we come across a Flash-based website, or even just some funky part of a normal webpage that’s Flash-based. And we notice certain things:

· Maybe things moving around, fast!

· Maybe interactive things, almost like a little movie you get to control

· Maybe video or sound

· Maybe it just seems pretty dynamic for a webpage

That’s Flash, and that’s just the tip of it. Flash is a program for creating all kinds of things, but mostly it’s used for making “movies” that people drop into various parts of normal webpages. It could be a Flash banner ad, or a Flash company logo. These Flash “movies” download really quickly due to their small file size, and can do pretty flashy things.

Sometimes an entire website will be made in Flash, which usually means it will take longer to download than a normal website. So when people make an entire website in Flash, they’ll often offer a non-Flash version of the site (e.g., Hollywood movie websites often have Flash and non-Flash version of their websites).

Flash is so different from usual content on the Web that your browser won’t know what to do with it unless you’ve downloaded the Flash plug-in first.

And that’s why Flash is like French kissing.

You can download the Flash plug in here: http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash