Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Creating Dramatic Visual Effects ............................................................
In This Chapter
Adding static filters
Increasing excitement with dynamic transitions
Transitioning between pages or sites
A
well-designed Web page is a wonder to behold, but it’s not a joy forever.
Right now, your Web pages primarily compete with magazines and
other static media. This won’t always be the case, however. Eventually, Web
pages must go up against the excitement offered by television and other
active, dynamic, animated media. In fact, the Web may well one day blend
with digital TV into a single medium. After all, a pixel is a pixel, and all that
separates the Internet from television is some hardware restrictions, some
old habits that are a little hard to break, and, above all, the fact that televi-
sion production and Web design are — for the time being anyway — two
different jobs.Given current Internet bandwidth restrictions affecting more than half of
the visitors to your site, you can expect that these 56K modem-connected
folks won’t sit still and wait for your page to download heavily animated
moving picture shows. (Bandwidthrefers to the amount of info that can
stream through.) However, at least 40 percent of urban home users in the
United States now have high-speed Internet. And that trend shows no sign
of slowing down. Experts estimate broadband penetration may reach 70
percent relatively soon.For one thing, nearly 80 percent of American workers are exposed to broad-
band Internet, usually at their workplace. And after you’ve tried broadband,
you don’t want to go home to a pokey 56K modem.Now that you’re convinced that Internet bandwidth will make animated Web
pages increasingly popular, why not get your feet wet by exploring some of the
cooler tricks currently available? In this chapter, you explore transitions —
ways to segue your users (or should we call them viewers?) from one image
to the next, or between Web pages. You also get a little taste of adding the
power of scripting to CSS — writing some simple programs that react to the
user clicking a button on your page.