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

Working with the context state stack to save and restore styles


When creating more complex HTML5 canvas applications, you'll find yourself needing a way to revert back to previous style combinations so that you don't have to set and reset dozens of style properties at different points in the drawing process. Fortunately, the HTML5 canvas API provides us with access to the context state stack which allows us to save and restore context states. In this recipe, we'll demonstrate how the state stack works by saving the context state, setting the global alpha, drawing a transparent circle, restoring the state stack to the state before we set the global alpha, and then drawing an opaque square. Let's take a look!

Getting ready...

Before we cover the canvas state stack, it's imperative that you understand how a stack data structure works (if you already do, you can skip to the How it works section).

A stack data structure is a last in, first out (LIFO) structure. Stacks have three major operations...