A While back I saw a clicked on a link to a page. Instead of loading like a regular page would, I remember it doing a “wipe”, kinda like when a movie transistions between scenes. It was a nice graceful way to segue between pages. My question is, which tool was used for this? A friend of mine offhandedly mentioned it was ActiveX. Or was it Flash? The page it went to appeared like a normal page with texts and links and everything, can you do that with Flash?
I actually hate asking these kinda techie questions here, but this is the place I know I can go for answers!
All I know is that it was one of the special features that web site designers can use on their pages if someone was viewing their site using Internet Explorer 4 or above.
You can do it in various ways. Macromedia Flash creates animated movies, which can include text, pictures and links, although they can take a while to load and interfere with the way your ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons work. You can also program it using JavaScript, and there’s a few cut-and-paste scripts listed ( at this site ). Of course, not everyone surfs with JavaScript switched on, so the designer has to take a choice on it.
After some searches on Microsoft’s website, here what I found : The “wipes” are referred to as transitions and they are done with Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.
Like Louis said, in order for it to work you have to have IE 4.0 or higher. You don’t need to use cascading style sheets, you just need to use a META tag (one line of code). Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the syntax for it, but essentially you tell the META tag what page you’re making the transition to, how long you want the transition to take, and what type of transition you are going to use. There are a bunch of styles, including a fade-in, a wipe to the left and a wipe to the right.
Microsoft Press’ book on DHTML has a code sample for it.
(though, like Crusoe said, use Flash if you want it to work on Netscape as well…but I suspect that it will require more code)