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


So far, we've learned how to draw on the canvas, work with images and video, and create fluid animations. This chapter focuses on canvas interactivity. Until now, all of our canvas projects have been very unresponsive and disengaged from the user. Although the HTML5 canvas API doesn't provide us with a means for attaching event listeners to shapes and regions, we can certainly achieve this functionality by extending the API. According to the HTML5 specification, once a shape is drawn, we have no access to it as an object like we do with DOM elements in an HTML document. Until the HTML5 canvas specification includes methods for attaching event listeners to shapes and regions, (hopefully it will some day), we'll need to construct our own Events class which will enable us to do so. Our class will enable us to attach event listeners to regions which wrap one or more shapes, similar to attaching event listeners to DOM elements.

This is quite a powerful notion because it enables us...