jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques - Index of

10
Canvas Animations
In the last chapter, we looked at one of the latest CSS3 styles: the transform,
which enabled us to create animated rotations, skews, scales, and translates.
In this chapter, we're going to look at one of the new additions to HTML5—the
element.
The best way to think of the element is to treat it like the kind of
canvas on which an artist would paint. We can draw simple lines or complex
shapes using JavaScript API methods, and there is also support for images
and text. The canvas is two dimensional at this point, but may be extended to
include 3D support in the future.
The element, first proposed and used by Apple, has been
implemented by most common browsers, and is considered one of the most
stable elements from the HTML5 specification. However, support for it is not
yet universal.
Like CSS3 transforms, the element isn't supported in any current
version of Internet Explorer (although it is supported in IE9), but just like
transforms, there are alternatives that can be used in IE to create the same
effect as , which we'll look at when we come to the examples a little
later in the chapter.
The best description of the element I've seen states "A canvas is
a rectangle in your page where you can use JavaScript to draw anything you
want", from diveintohtml5.org, which sums it up quite nicely I feel.