Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips

Normally, the world of transparent backgrounds is only reserved for GIF images on HTML pages. However, Flash has a rarely-used feature that will enable your movies to have a transparent background too.

Go to Publish Settings (CTRL-SHIFT-F12) and on the HTML tab, change the Window Mode to Transparent Windowless. Publish your document and make a few changes to the published HTML page so that your page has a background image or something else that will be different from the standard background.

If you have Flash in an existing HTML page, add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent">

Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag:

wmode="transparent"

Macromedia Flash Player version 6,0,65,0 (Windows) or 6,0,67,0 (Macintosh) or higher and a compatible browser are required for this feature to work. You should check www.macromedia.com for an up-to-date list of compatible browsers because the list will change in the future. Despite the minor restrictions, this tip can make for some very cool overlapping of HTML and Flash content.