Animations in HTML5 - CodeProject®

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Introduction to Article by Florian Rappl

HTML5 is becoming more and more popular. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, the need for alternatives to the popular Flash plugin from Adobe has also been growing. Just recently, Adobe announced that Flash will no longer be supported for mobile devices. This means that Adobe itself will focus on HTML5 as a key technology for those devices - and desktop systems sooner or later.
One disadvantage of HTML was the lack of multimedia techniques. In HTML, you could not display a video or draw on the screen. With HTML5, new elements such as  and have been introduced. Those elements give developers the possibility to use multimedia technology in "native" HTML, just by writing some JavaScript in combination with HTML. A basic action that should be provided by multimedia technologies is animation. In HTML5, there are some ways to create such actions.
In this article, I will only compare the new   element with the upcoming CSS3 animation technique. Other possibilities would include the creation and animation of DOM elements or SVG elements. Those possibilities will not be included in this discussion. It should be noted from the beginning that the canvas-technology is supported in the current releases of all major browsers, while CSS3 animations are only possible in the latest editions of Firefox and Chrome. The next IE will also provide CSS3 animations.

Animations in HTML5 - CodeProject®