flash format

Flash or Flash Video is a presentation format for interactive vector graphics and animation on the web. Developed by Macromedia and later marketed by Adobe, it allows web designers to create Flash banners and interactive web interfaces with animated buttons. Flash supports transparent vector graphics, animated buttons and menus, animation, and morphing shapes and color fills, among other features.

With vector and bitmap transparency, users can project transparent vector objects onto bitmaps. Surface animation is suitable for creating structured, interactive menus that help the user navigate. Morphing allows web designers to morph graphics across multiple images and create dynamic transitions, and the bandwidth profiling feature supports streaming at different transfer rates.

For 3D features and other computationally intensive applications, there is the proprietary Shockwave Flash( SWF). Interactive implementations of Flash applications are created using the ActionScriptprogramming language. The extension for Flash files is *.fla, for Flash video *.flv.