I'm resisting the temptation to quote Queen's Eighties hit Flash.

Because the web site animation tool of the same name is neither a "miracle" nor "king of the impossible". It's definitely not the "saviour of the universe".

But since its release in the mid-Nineties, it has been the "must have" tool for creating and deploying multimedia content. Or, to use the words of subversive weblog b3ta: "A new wave of creative idiots are storming the web. Flash is their weapon of choice."

The free Flash Player has become the de facto standard for running web page animations at low bandwidth speeds and is installed on more than 96 per cent of PCs connected to the internet.

The b3ta site isn't a bad place to begin "flashing" if your taste runs to the unusual and sometimes extreme.

Its archive of special features has a top-ten list of Flash videos, including the classic All Your Base animation, which samples the old Sega MegaDrive game, Zero Wing.

There is also a list of top-ten web games. My personal favourite is "chicken wings are not for flying", which involves rescuing incredibly cute little chicks by throwing them umbrellas to use as parachutes.

If you like inflicting virtual pain, the Joe Cartoon web site is the one for you. Without giving too much away, Micro-Gerbil 2001's animated gerbil-meets-microwave antics will cause more than a few laughs but do turn up the sound.

You can find a number of other links to best-of-breed Flash sites on bestflashanimationsite.com Each week, five new Flash sites are added with the top three previous week's sites added to one of the site's archive categories.

But there's more to Flash and it's partner in crime, Shockwave, than fun and frolics. Macromedia is lobbying designers and application developers to create entire pages in Flash, promising better applications, ranging from online advertising to e-learning courses.

Critics have said Flash doesn't lend itself to indexing and is tougher to work with than pure open source code. Previous criticism of Flash has focused on those web designers who have plagued surfers with lengthy Flash-animated introductions to web sites.

Maybe Macromedia has "gotta leave you all behind and face the truth" as per Bohemian Rhapsody but "I'm easy come, easy go, little high, little low" and I like my Flash.

www.macromedia.com
www.b3ta.com
www.joecartoon.com
www.bestflashanimationsite.com