7. Animation on the web

Apart from pure entertainment found in films and cartoons, animation also has a very practical purpose in more business-like situations.

Draw attention

If you want to enliven a page or to draw attention to part of a web page, then animation can be used to draw the eye. For example, we use the little fellow below to draw attention to a search box on some of our pages.

This is an example of an animated gif. An animated gif is a standard file format made up of a few frames of static images. The web browser loops through each frame quickly to create the animation.

Advertising Banners

You will notice that advertising banners make heavy use of animation all over the internet as they are very keen to get your attention.

Interactive games and quizzes

There are other animation technologies as well that include

• CGI - Computer Generated Imagery, widely used in modern films
• Java - similar to Flash in that it can be used for animation.
• Dynamic HTML - the latest HTML 5 standard supports basic animation without 'add-ons' such as Flash, but only the very latest browsers support it.