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/
Ram Sundarkumar
Cool. Nice to see this project off the ground. I’ve actually been keeping up with this project through Nathan’s blog posts and it seems like you guys are on the right track with the coding and whatnot.
There is actually some Javascript stuff on the Internet using this node type system, however like Nathan said in his post it doesn’t fuction well but just a proof-of-concept thing I guess.
HTML5 is definitely the way to go. I’ve been posting stuff to the SIF Sharepoint Site about 3D simulations using Canvas. Pretty cool stuff that just looks pretty.
Hope you guys can find a way to represent the data with tags or something. Maybe an algorithm or something.