Call HTML Layers from Flash
by Greg Harvey, Reader rating: 6.9
Greg began working for advertising agencies in 2000 as a Web developer where he quickly extended his portfolio to include multimedia, ASP and SQL. His work has won several industry awards in the past year.
This tutorial requires some knowledge of the following: HTML, CSS, Flash, JavaScript and ASP (or similar for creating and reading cookies).
This is quite a pleasing way of making animation in Flash work with HTML text. It’s incredibly simple, and the principle relies on Flash’s getURL() ActionScript, which is more versatile than you might think when used imaginatively with other programming languages such as JavaScript.
Here’s the scenario: in one particular project the designer wanted a Flash animation to run at the top of the page and then on completion of the Flash sequence, the text to appear. You could do all of this in Flash however in this example ill be displaying the text in HTML layers.
First step: The layout
Create your web page using ‘layers’ in the usual way. (If you’re not familiar with ‘layers’ then have a fish around Google for a while and find out more – it’s well worth your while.) In my case I had a layer for navigation, a layer for the text content and a layer for Flash, like so:
The effect I'm after is to hide the TEXT CONTENT layer until the Flash movie has finished playing, so the first thing I do is set that layer's visibility property to hidden. The other two layers stay visible by default.
