Flash 4 review cont.

Alternatives to Flash

As the de facto standard for web animation in general, there are only few alternatives to Flash. Among the most important, is Adobe LiveMotion®.

LiveMotion is a web animation program that is very much similar to Adobe AfterEffects®, a long time standard for video-editing. LiveMotion has the ability to output Macromedia Flash .swf files natively. This makes LiveMotion an obvious competitor for Flash.
However, LiveMotion is still first generation, and can only output Flash 3 files. Alas, you won't be able to have the same degree of interactivity as that of Flash. And if you're thinking of e-commerce, forget LiveMotion.

When talking alternatives, Dynamic HTML should also be mentioned. Dynamic HTML was introduced with Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers version 4 and above. It allows you to create animated websites and fully control the layout of a webpage. Combine this with Javascript and applets, and you should be able to achieve some degree of interactivity, or even build an e-store. However, DHTML still has some of the same limitations as regular HTML, such as limited font support. And there's no vector graphics support.

Currently, a standard for vector graphics is being developed for native support in web browsers - VML, Vector Markup Language. This is still in development, however, so it's not an alternative yet.