- Using the Flash Text Feature
- Using the Flash Buttons Feature
- Applying a Silly Flash Trick
- Conclusion
Applying a Silly Flash Trick
There is always time for a silly Flash trick. One of the things I mentioned earlier is that the default background color for each Flash movie is white. This can be changed if your users are viewing your website with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0+ (which is about 90 percent of the people coming to your site according to statistics from Nielson//Netratings).
Select a Flash movie, such as the Flash Text you created earlier, and open the Properties panel for the movie. If you have the panel fully expanded, you will see the Parameters button in the bottom right corner. Select the Parameters button to open the Parameters dialog box (see Figure 6). This allows you to add additional parameters to the movie that are specific to only Internet Explorer (because Netscape and Microsoft handle Web plug-ins differently).
Figure 6 The Parameters dialog box.
Click the + button to add a new parameter on the Properties panel. Add a new parameter and call it "wmode" with a value of "transparent". Select OK to save your changes, which will not be immediately apparent until you preview the page in your Web Browser.
When you view the page in your Web browser you will see that the additional parameter makes the background color for the Flash movie transparent. This allows the background color (or image) to show through in the same way a transparent GIF file will show through the background. In addition, this allows Flash movies to be placed in Dreamweaver Layers and stacked on top of each other. It is just a silly trick, but I like it.