WELCOME > STEP 3: PUBLISHING HTML

When you are satisfied with appearance of your intro it is time to publish it so that the animation can be used at your site. Flash publishes animation files in .SWF format, which is not editable, and others will not be able to use your work. .SWF files are embedded into HTML page much like .GIF or .JPEG files - with a help of special HTML tag.

PREMIUM FLASH SITES

However, the syntax is more complex, hence this tag is also responsible for a timely download of the Flash Player if one is needed (see Introduction to Flash). To make things easy, Flash also exports a page with a snippet of animation embedding code you can cut and paste from the exported file and into your page. The substeps provide more details:

3.1. Make sure that File>Publish settings are set up correctly: go to Formats tab and check Flash and HTML boxes. You will not need the others so uncheck them. Click OK.

3.2. Select File>Publish and see new files (.HTML and .SWF) created in the same folder as your .FLA file.

3.3. Open the .HTML file in a text editor and copy the <OBJECT>…</ OBJECT> tag that may look like this:

Text like this taken from the exported file should appear in HTML code of your page where you want the animation to be played. The .SWF file must also be present on the server and available via the path specified in SRC attribute of EMBED tag. 

This concludes the Free Sample Flash Into tutorial. However, there is much more to Flash animation than this. http://www.FlashKit.com and http://www.Macromedia.com/desdev/mx/blueprint are some of the good places to start on improving your skills.