jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques - Index of

Canvas, IE, and the alternatives
Our flag example will work in IE9, but not in any previous version. If we run the previous
example in IE8 or lower, we'll see the fallback content consisting of a paragraph of
explanatory text:
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Chapter 10
The fallback mechanism for the HTML5 element is simple but effective. Any
browser that doesn't understand the element simply displays any elements that are
contained within it, while supporting browsers do not show any of its content except what
we draw using the JavaScript API.
There is an easy way that we can allow our flag to work in older versions of IE thanks to the
explorercanvas library created by Google. IE uses a proprietary technology called Vector
Markup Language (VML) which is similar (but much older than and now deprecated) to the
. In fact it was Microsoft's alternative technology to Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG) but can also be used as a simple approximation.
Using the explorercanvas library is almost as simple as downloading it and then referencing
it in the page on which the appears, but there is a subtle change that we need to
make to our code.
The explorercanvas library can be downloaded from Google's code
repository at http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/.
API methods that simply do not work
The explorercanvas library does not port all canvas functionality to IE. A couple of methods
and techniques simply will not work. These include:
The clearRect() method will not work in IE
Radial gradients do not work in IE
Non-uniform scaling does not work correctly