vector v. raster

suprisingly, flash movies used as textures do not provide superior resolution to raster textures. This seems to be because the flash movie is only rendered once by the browser, at world load, at a fixed size, and is not resized further, regardless of zoom.
However, flash movies can still provide significant savings in file size.
[wrl]

textures at half size:
.gif
512 x 512 .gif = 13.150Kb 512 x 512 .swf =  2.807Kb