Flashing Banners

[Cellton]

How do create flashing banners(flashing text, not pictures), like this:
http://d.sys.lv/?adp=832&t=5 Not clickable(no redirection required by clicking on banner), just text.

Cellton

[Mandi]

That's a Flash animation, created using the tool by Macromedia.

[lepton]

Another option would be an animated gif if you have Photoshop and Image Ready.

Dave

[Cellton]

Can I doing this just using JavaScript?

cellton

[Mandi]

Javascript is useful for making "rollover" graphics - where the graphic changes when a user mouses over the area - but it won't produce animation itself. It's a scripting language that instructs browsers to perform certain tasks, not a graphics creation tool. The links at the very top of this page are an example of that - they change color when you mouse over them.

Your choices are either the Flash animator, or a graphics app that can make animated .gif files. I use Paint Shop Pro's Animation Shop, from Jasc (http://www.jasc.com/). Alternatively, there's a lot of freeware art out there, already animated and ready to go.

[kitchin]

JavaScript can do animation. It has a timer function, called setTimeout, and I was once a big user of JS animation. Here' s my example page, though it may be out of date in its programming wonderfulness:
http://www.lapage.com/animation.htm

JS is not the ideal way to do animation, but I prefered it to bloatly buggy Java, or optional plug-ins, back in the day. As for animated GIF's, they had only 256 colors, and some early browsers only showed the first frame, or even nothing. With JS you got to use jpeg's, so better compression and better colors!

The problem with JS animation is that you will never get the preload vs. wait-for-each-image thing right. You just have to guess how fast the user's connection is, so how long it will take to pre-fetch. There's no function to tell you whether the images are in the cache yet, or at least there wasn't when I did this work.

A true animation/vector thing like Flash is much better. JS animation is like GIF animation, the bandwidth doubles when you double the number of frames. Not so with Flash, which produces tiny files.

Most computer users have Flash, right? Even WebTV had it, and that was a good while ago.

[Mandi]

Oh, wow . . . learn something everyday here at FutureQuest U 8} ! I never heard of that/saw that before! It's definately clunky, though.

[Cellton]

To tell truth, a flashing banners not always good, static text banners looks even better and do not tire. Also, many online banner creators have the limited fonts set, while for banners is more approach "Display fonts"- smooth fonts, without notches, not standard Office fonts.

Cellton

[Mandi]

I think you mean Anti-aliased fonts - I agree, they do look much nicer. Using a graphic definately opens up your options for font design, since you don't have to merely hope that the visitor has your particular font installed.