Chapter 15. Creating Media Rich and Interactive Applications
15.0. Introduction
Pretty pictures. Cool videos. Sound!
The Web of the future will be a richer place, indeed, with the new and improved innovations ready to use. Our old friends SVG and Canvas are getting new life and generating new interest. Added to them are the new video and audio elements included in HTML5, and the near-future potential of 3D graphics.
JavaScript and CSS provide a malleable palette in which to paint web
pages, but SVG and the canvas element
provide the capability to take those pages into new and exciting
territory.
SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, is an XML-based vector graphics
language that can be used to create scalable vector graphics within web
pages. You can insert the SVG into object elements, or in certain
circumstances embed the SVG directly in the web page. New advances also
allow you to include SVG using the img
element, and CSS.
SVG is normally a static XML markup, and not dependent on JavaScript. However, as will be demonstrated later in the chapter, SVG and JavaScript can be used to create any number of dynamic graphics.
The canvas element originated with Apple, and is now becoming
standardized as part of the HTML5/Web Applications 1.0 effort. Unlike SVG,
the canvas element is totally dependent
on JavaScript. We add canvas elements
into our page and then use a 2D context API in order to draw into these
elements.
SVG and Canvas are implemented in varying degrees in all of this book’s target ...
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