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Click image for closer view of the Expert Mode ActionScript Window. The Novice Mode just shows the friendly little icons to the left.

As Flash moves beyond even complicated animations to create full-blown online applications, describing the structure of authored files and their relationship to each other, which often changes over time, becomes extremely difficult. Flash 5 introduces the Movie Explorer, which lays out these branched hierarchies of nested objects. Individual elements are searchable, and easily moved to other places in the structure.

For heavy lifting in complicated sites that need frequent updating, nothing beats scripting. The interfaces for scripting introduced in Flash 4 were fine for designers, but were of limited use to programmers. The ActionScript language of Flash 5 now matches the syntax and structure of JavaScript, and can be exported to a text editor for tweaking. Beginning scripters will be pleased to note that ActionScript is accessible in a drag-and-drop Novice mode as well. Scripts can also be saved and shared.

The place that many computer artists first encountered vector art was in the context of printing, which, alas, remains one of the weakest parts of the online experience.

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"Printing anything but the simplest online documents simply doesn't work most of the time," observes Wittman. "Images are bitmapped, fonts are unreadable, and key parts of the layout often don't translate well.

"The alternative before now was to encode a separate document for download, open that in the foreground, set to print and then return to the broswer. As a vector format, Flash is just made for printing. Using the existing Macromedia Flash Player, consumers have all the software necessary to view and print high-impact, high-quality content."

Macromedia calls this Web-Native Printing, and it offers several additional advantages. One of them is that, like its online counterparts, printed Flash documents are consistent across browser and platform. More interesting still is WYPINWYS - pronounced "wippenwiss" - which stands for "What You Print is Not What You See:" content for printing can be downloaded on demand and printed in the background.

Even this is just scratching the surface of what the new Flash is about. "When taking all the new features as a whole, it's easy to see that Flash 5 will forever change the way the web is viewed," says Robin Debreuil, of Debreuil Digital Works.

"Flash used to be the icing on the cake," adds Brad Johnson, Second Story Interactive. "Today it's the icing, the cake, and what's for dinner! It has changed the way we approach web development and made it nearly impossible to create compelling sites without it."