Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It's easy to get content into layers. Any Web content can be placed into layers:
•
Text
•
Images
•
Tables
•
Forms
•
Multimedia (Flash)
•
Other layers
To get content into layers you can
Insert >Images
into a layer or you can type
directly into layer. We will be using layers more and more so you may want to
practice creating a page and adding some layers, then adding some text or an
image from your images folder.
Now that you have learned about layers, let's discuss how to make them
animate and move.
Layer Motion with Timelines
The timeline inspector is a wonderful, powerful tool; it allows us to make HTML
files dynamically move. They also provide a method of simple animation that
does not require the experience and patience of using Macromedia Flash. We
will examine some techniques using layers and the timelines in Dreamweaver.
Now, this portion of the text will get a bit in-depth. If you feel that you are not
ready to start with dynamic pages and want to stick to static, non-moving pages
for now, you can skip ahead to using the properties inspector to position your
layers and make a balanced Web page layout. Let us continue with layers and
animation.
The basis for animation is change over time. The timeline consists of channels.
Each channel contains frames, and the frames represent time. The timeline is
best set to move at a certain rate over time. For example, if the timeline was set
for 15 frames per second for a 10 second animation, assuming perfect
performance conditions, the animation would run go through 15 frames per
second until 10 seconds were met and 150 frames were run.
Animation channels are numbered and have a top down stacking order similar
to layers. The only elements that can be animated and manipulated on the
