Adobe’s Flash has a lot of uses, but one of the most impressive to me has been the the creation of interactive graphs on a web page. One just has to visit Google Finance to see a great example of this in action; it’s fast, effective and fits seemlessly within the rest of the page.
Many times, however, Flash isn’t an appropriate technology to use. If you’re an open-source product like Zenoss, Flash presents a licensing issue. If you’re targeting mobile platforms like the iPhone, Flash isn’t available. And, sometimes, you may just not like Flash; it does have it’s own security problems and overhead, for example. What’s a web developer to do? Enter HTML5 to the rescue…
HTML5 is not yet an approved standard, but it’s well on its way and surprisingly well-supported by the browser community already. One of the nice new features provided in HTML5 is the canvas element which allows for two-dimensional drawing functionality. Between this new feature and JavaScript, we should be able to create a rich graph display.
Great post. Where did you get the information on browser support? I did this test (http://html5test.com/) with the latest Firefox (3.6.3), and it didn’t seem to do very well.
A lot of the places talking about the various HTML5 elements talk about the various state of the browsers. The canvas tag is supported well by Firefox, so that’s the important thing for now
@MIke Lunt