thanks everybody! i'm going to see about flash, too (no offense, fireworks!).
it might be nice to do mouseover effects for the hour and minute hands in flash
instead of the ticking clock of an animated gif.

oh and amy that's a good idea! that will keep the file size down. at first i
was thinking "duh," heh heh. but then i actually read your post, and i
realized i can have 3 separate images on the page.

i can use the absolute positioning with CSS, and the Z-order of the images
doesn't matter, since the they are all transparent and they don't overlap. the
minute hand file will still be large, but it will only be 59 frames, not 700
frames. man i was being an idiot before. this way is much better.

if there's any wait for the minute hand image, the hour hand and the
background will load really fast in the meanwhile.

thanks again alex, pjr and amy...