Timeline overview This topic contains a ShowMe movie

Use timelines to create animation without using any ActiveX controls, plugins, or Java applets. Timelines use Dynamic HTML features to change the properties of layers and images in a series of frames over time. The layer functions of timelines work only in 4.0 or later browsers.

Timelines create animation by changing the position, size, visibility, and stacking order of a layer. Timelines are also useful for other actions that you want to occur in time after a page loads. For example, timelines can change the source file of an image that is not in a layer and they can execute behaviors at a particular frame.

Open the HTML inspector to see the JavaScript code generated by a timeline. The timeline code is in the MM_initTimelines function, inside a SCRIPT tag in the HEAD of the document.

Click Show Me for an animated introduction to using timelines.

You can open the file created in this ShowMe movie from a browser, or you can open it in Dreamweaver by choosing Help > Open Example and selecting !timeline_example.htm.

When editing the HTML of a document containing timelines, be careful not to alter anything to which a timeline refers.