What is Flash and what is a Flash movie or animation or shock wave file?
The best way to think describe flash is an animated film or movie. Flash documents are large and oftentimes complex digitally animated works of art involving muliple layers and frames of text, images sound or even video running like a movie at 12 frames per second. These documents are converted to a smaller form of digital file, often called shock wave files or .swf files. Shock wave files run readily on 90% of the browsers in the world or can be viewed quite quickly with a free download of Flash Player or of Shock Wave Player. These players can also be downloaded as a standalone player that can be used separate from a web browser.
