# Webdesign questions



## Ark (Dec 29, 2004)

I have a few questions, maybe some of you can answer them. I'm sure Google could but I don't know what to search for, and as powerful as Google is, it's not branched out into the realms of reading peoples' minds. Yet.

So, #1: Is there a way to have a flash animation play over a .jpg file without having that flash file present at all times?
By which I mean... take the 'Reply' button on this post. Over there. Now would it be possible to, on a mouseover, have the "reply" text glow without the entire thing being a Flash file? I think Newgrounds might do it, or they may be well-made .gifs, I can't rightly remember.

Secondly, is there a way to tell a webpage to not show content until it's been loaded 100% to avoid that 'line-loading' effect?


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## ricerider623 (Oct 21, 2004)

You may want to look into some CSS and or Java scripts.I used a little of both, but have never tried flash yet.I am pretty much a newb at it myself.
There are a lot of resources out there that are free and may need a little adaptation for your particular needs, but in addition to giving you the effects you want, give you experience as well.
Good luck,Mikey


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## Sequal7 (Jan 13, 2005)

No... you cant place flash over a jpeg image and see the full jpeg. If you put the jpeg image as a background in a table, then placed a flash object over it, you would not see the full jpeg image, the flash movie would obscure the background. 
Flash is not a one way street, meaning the movie must not always play, loop or reload. A movie can wait for you to do something (mouseover, click, rollover, hover etc) before it loads the rest of the movie.

A simple example of this is the 8 larger buttons "flash portal, games, audio portaletc." at the top of the page you listed, which are flash (you can tell by the WIDTH="486" HEIGHT="92" that it is one large flash object embedded into page)

A more complex example is a website I built, the entire navigational componant is flash, notice the vehicle color changes when you hover over the navigational buttons but do nothing until that event. 
http://www.silverarrowcars.com

The most copmplex is my business partners and my website, he is a flash guru, and I am a flash groupie (learning allot from him) Basically our whole site is flash, embedded into html. Site show you how good flash is, if used correctly.
http://www.2advanced.com

Gif's with mouseover effects can mimick this, but they arent as "pretty" although they can look very close. We built one a while back, he wanted flash, dhtml, javascripting and gifs (strictly cost)
http://www.greersystems.com

As you can see, DHTML, Javascript and other forms can also mimick flash, but again, cant duplicate it.

If you want images to load faster, make them smaller. Flash compresses the movie you make, making it load faster. Flash can preload the movie, showing a preloader while the movie loads to the clients browser. You can have images preload too but they cant be large, or the browser will appear to freeze, or will look very distorted while image wait to load.

There are two steps to creating rollovers (preloading images)

- Paste the first into the HEAD of your HTML document
- Add the last code into the BODY of your HTML document

Copy this code into the HEAD of your HTML document (replacing image1, image1over ...etc with you actual image location and the http location of your webpage the image should link to)


```
<HEAD>

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!-- Begin

image1 = new Image();
image1.src = "image1over.gif";

image2 = new Image();
image2.src = "image2over.gif";

image3 = new Image();
image3.src = "image3over.gif";

image4 = new Image();
image4.src = "image3over.gif";

// End -->
</script>
</HEAD>

<!-- STEP TWO: Insert this code into the BODY of your HTML document  -->

<BODY>

<a href="http://yoursite.com" onmouseover="image1.src='image1over.gif';"
onmouseout="image1.src='image1.gif';">
<img name="image1" src="image1.gif" border=0></a>

<a href="http://yoursite.com/page2" onmouseover="image2.src='image2over.gif';"
onmouseout="image2.src='image2.gif';">
<img name="image2" src="image2.gif" border=0></a>

<a href="http://yoursite.com/page3" onmouseover="image3.src='image3over.gif';"
onmouseout="image3.src='image3.gif';">
<img name="image3" src="image3.gif" border=0></a>

<a href="http://yoursite.com/page4" onmouseover="image4.src='image3over.gif';"
onmouseout="image4.src='image4.gif';">
<img name="image4" src="image4.gif" border=0></a>

</BODY>
```


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## Amnesia_180 (Jul 2, 2004)

You could also use layers, but im not sure if you could see the whole .jpeg underneath the flash (unless the transparecy layers are set correctly) but im not sure if they stay in a flash animation


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## Ark (Dec 29, 2004)

Thanks for that, it's a big help.
It's just that I didn't want the flash components to be the only thing on the page, nor did I want to have to build seperate pages for 56k and broadband connections. Not that it would be too difficult, but I'm lazy.  

But what you've told me really helps. Thanks.
_(I'm unused to giving gratitute, so I apologise if this sounds forced. Because it is, but I mean well.)_


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