For the front end of Deliberation mapping tool, we had the choice of either using HTML5 or flash. HTML 5 is supposed to the future of web development and flash is getting less popular for websites. Hence, this lead to the design decision of using HTML 5 over flash.[1][2]
In HTML 5, animations can be shown using canvas element. To ramp up my knowledge about HTML 5 canvas element, I started exploring the web for examples having clickable elements on canvas [3]. In the example, circular regions are created on canvas elements and the clicks are handled using jQuery and iterating over each circular region to find out whether the region corresponding to it has been clicked.
This lead to me reading up about jQuery, which I shall describe in my next post.
References
- http://myoocreate.com/why-adobe-flash-is-dying/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash
- http://pterkildsen.com/2013/06/28/create-a-html5-canvas-element-with-clickable-elements/