**3.2.1 Flash**

The software Flash® (Reinhardt, 2004) is a commercial application whose main objective is to generate animations for the web using vectors. The properties of the software fit very well with the development of the project. On the one hand vector graphics are used and secondly, there is a direct interaction of the user with the animations. Flash ® works creating vector illustrations, that is, mathematical representations of straight lines, curve lines, colours and positions. One advantage of the vector illustrations is that the quality of the illustration does not depend on the resolution. Another advantage is that they have the ability to be downloaded very fast as their weight is really small compared with other illustrations with equivalent map of bits. Every example developed for the web application does not weight more than 80 Kb which is very interesting for the students because they can open them in an easy way, even with narrow band Internet.

There is still another advantage for the students and it is that the licence is needed for the creation of the files, or the exercises in our case, but not for the visualization of the files. Flash compiles the executable file .exe or the file .swf that can be executed from the most known web navigators with just an open plugin available for most of them. The estimations are that 80 % of the computers can visualize Flash applications so that every documentation developed using Flash can be easily used by any student any where.

#### **3.2.2 Dreamweaver**

The software Dreamweaver® (Lowery, 2001) is also a commercial application that provides the user with many tools that help very much in the activity of the design and the creation of web sites. With this kind of software the user is able to create very complex web sites, with thousands of pages, animations and sounds with very little knowledge on programming. In the development of this web site, the authors have used the Cascade Style Sheets (CSS) as they improve the web documents design and presentation. In general, the Style Sheet is a set of instructions that indicates how the pages should appear or how the contents should be shown within them. Any change in the style sheet will produce an immediate change in the appearance of the pages no need to do it in each one. In this way, contents and appearance are completely separated, which helps very much the design work.
