Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By : Eric Rowell
Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By: Eric Rowell

Overview of this book

The HTML5 canvas is revolutionizing graphics and visualizations on the Web. Powered by JavaScript, the HTML5 Canvas API enables web developers to create visualizations and animations right in the browser without Flash. Although the HTML5 Canvas is quickly becoming the standard for online graphics and interactivity, many developers fail to exercise all of the features that this powerful technology has to offer.The HTML5 Canvas Cookbook begins by covering the basics of the HTML5 Canvas API and then progresses by providing advanced techniques for handling features not directly supported by the API such as animation and canvas interactivity. It winds up by providing detailed templates for a few of the most common HTML5 canvas applications—data visualization, game development, and 3D modeling. It will acquaint you with interesting topics such as fractals, animation, physics, color models, and matrix mathematics. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the HTML5 Canvas API and a toolbox of techniques for creating any type of HTML5 Canvas application, limited only by the extent of your imagination.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Canvas Security
Index

Introduction


This chapter will reveal the power of canvas transformations, which can drastically simplify complex drawings and provide new functionality that we wouldn't have had otherwise. Until now, we've been positioning elements on the screen directly with x and y coordinates. This can quickly become a problem if you've worked out the coordinates for each point of a complex drawing, and then later decide that the entire drawing needs to be repositioned, rotated, or scaled. Canvas transforms solve this problem by enabling the developer to translate, rotate, and scale entire sections of the canvas without having to rework the coordinates of each point that make up a drawing. In addition, canvas transforms also enable the developer to rotate and scale images and text, which isn't possible without transforms. Let's get started!