HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come

An anonymous reader writes with an interesting and impressive demonstration of modern browsers' HTML 5 capabilities. "From the 9elements blog: 'HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. [...] We've created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML 5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine.' The site warns "(beware: sophisticated browser needed)"; Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine.

Comments

Slideshow

[slick_rick]

Is a slideshow on my old Dell D820 (core duo, 2 gigs of ram, FF 3.5, Ubuntu Hardy)

Awesomely CPU Hungry

[The Real Nem]

It was so awesome it pegged a whole core on my E8400. I expect to web to fuel larger hard drives, but faster CPUs? That's gettinga little out of hand.

How do I mute the audio?

[ender-]

This is great, but it really needs a way to mute the audio. Or better yet, make the audio optional [opt-in] from the start.

And no, I don't want to just turn off my speakers. Maybe I'm listening to some music, now all of a sudden I've got some cheezy web-site music blaring in my headphones or out my speakers. Not cool...

Re:How do I mute the audio?

[Jared555]

It is even more fun if you are feeding sound into a stereo system playing music and a random sound comes on loud enough to deafen you. This is why I disable sound on any program possible.

Lost a speaker once because even with the volume controls on the stereo and computer turned to almost maximum whatever was playing was extremely quiet, all of a sudden either a program or website (I forget) started playing sound unexpectedly.

Yes windows allows per program control and pulse audio on linux probably allows control for every separate flash applet depending on the configuration but if you don't react fast enough you can still get hit with annoying/deafening sounds.

I dunno...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Is compiling a bunch of "tweets" really the best use of all the great new HTML5 capabilities?

Compared to flash...

[timeOday]

..what are the advantages of doing this in HTML? If HTML 5 can obviate a bunch of complex, unrelated web technologies that make programming for the Web today such a mess, then great... but if it just adds to the pile, and doesn't build on expertise in "classical" HTML, then it's just adding to the problem.

Re:Compared to flash...

[LiquidFire_HK]

Is eliminating Flash not enough? HTML5 is open and (being) standardised; anyone is free to implement it. (And you can see there are already several competing implementations in progress) Flash is a proprietary platform and you are solely dependant on the whims of Adobe. If even just for the lack of choice, Flash is a worse platform. Nothing's forcing Adobe to fix their player, while the HTML5 browsers definitely have some competition going on and are improving at an amazing rate - and in fact when HTML5 starts to pick up, Adobe will be forced to do something, as HTML5 itself will be competition to Flash.

Some people complain about how fast that thing runs (or how much CPU usage it takes), but I bet a flash version would not be even twice as fast, and Flash has existed for how long compared to browser support for HTML5 technologies?

Re:Compared to flash...

[Jeppe Salvesen]

That demo is so quick it was done before rendering on FF 3.5.2 on Centos 5.3, with 64bit flash.

Hoooray for Flash.

Re:I just checked it out with Firefox 3.5.2

[sumdumass]

I was sort of thinking the same things.

Now I'm wondering if the things I hate about Flash wasn't the actual software but what people were doing with it.

Re:No audio here thank god

[Red Alastor]

Websites that (successfully) make noise at me are one of my pet hates.

That's why I think it's awesome that HTML5 includes sound. You can't block the sound from a plugin that's executable code that does whatever it wants, however browser makers (and extension writers) can put settings options to let you opt-out for the sounds. Or prevent things from playing until you switch to the tab that wants to play them.

Canvas wasn't in HTML 5 originally

[Anonymous Coward]

The canvas tag was something that Safari put in their browser, before it was specified in HTML 5. So don't think HTML 5 invented it, they just embraced and extended it.

Re:Awesome

[Tony Hoyle]

IE6 is dead. You might as well ask if it runs under Firefox 1.0. It'll probably run under IE8 which is being pushed out as a critical update right now..

vs Flash

[Toonol]

It seems that a lot of people are viewing this as a way to get rid of flash. I don't think that will work. The only way it will dispense with flash, is if can be made to do all the annoying things that people hate flash for. 99% of the use for this will be annoying web apps that shouldn't be using all these features, advertisements, the occasional game, some streaming video...

Flash isn't that bad, it's just used very often for irritating purposes. Just as anything that could replace it will be.

Re:Awesome

[jcupitt65]

Lots of key sites (eg. youtube) are dropping IE6 support. Use rates on most top sites have dropped below 10%. The web is not useable with IE6. Most sites in development now are not supporting it, except by accident. IE6 is dead. Hooray!!

Re:Awesome

[maxume]

The entire point of canvas is programmatic drawing.

If you don't like javascript, that's fine, but I'm not sure how you expect an interactive drawing canvas to work without some sort of 'instructions' written in some sort of 'language'.

The advantages are supposed to be that it is standards based, and faster than DOM/CSS tricks, not that it doesn't involve javascript.