Path animation is one of the many reasons for flash to be popular. It gives you freedom to animate any object on a path. But as we know that Flash is not considered a Search engine friendly tool and it gives a nice excuse to adopt alternate methods and platforms for animations.

Talking about alternate platforms for animations, jQuery is the most popular among its competitors. jQuery Path provides a method of multidimensional animation, and in particular provides a method for animating along bezier curves and arcs. It is trivial to create other paths, or even animate other parameters.

Example quoted in this post animates some elements (bubbles) in a custom zig-zag path. jQuery.Path works fine on all modern browsers.