Possible draw on the iPhone/iPad web page using HTML5? - html

Is it possible to draw with your finger using the iPhone or iPad in HTML5? If the user were on a PC then the user would need to be using a mouse for the same effect.

Yes.
Check out deviantART's new drawing tool Muro for an example, and Apple's Safari DOM Additions Reference for an overview of the API.

It sounds like you're looking for something along the lines of SketchPad. It uses a <canvas> element in browsers that support it (and fakes it in IE).

Related

What is the best way to support drag and drop when a browser doesn't support HTML5 drag and drop?

My smartphone web browser supports many of HTML5's features, however it does not support HTML5 drag and drop. Attempting to drag objects merely scrolls the browser window...which being an extremely common operation on touch devices is probably why the feature is not supported by the browser.
What is the best way to support drag and drop functionality within a webpage on a mobile device that does not support HTML5 drag-and-drop?
AFAIK a client cannot change the behaviour of a website. Some sites support Drag and Drop, while some don't. It all depends on the way website is designed. If you are owner of a website and would like to add D&D feature, check this solution.
Also some browsers may not support this feature. Try using some other browser.
Note: It seems you are new to stackoverflow. Upvote and accept the answers if you like.

Flash embed with html overlay, wmode="direct"

I'm trying to place html elements over a flash video which must be rendered with wmode="direct" (video occupies entire window with html UI to be laid over it, anything other than direct makes CPU usage surge).
I've tried using an iframe to include the flash video, but I'm still unable to place any elements over it. Is there a workaround to achieve this?
According to Adobe's wmode browser support matrix, all major browsers at current versions on Mac already support this use case. On Windows support is spotty, only IE 9+ is claimed to work.
Like you, I'm trying to find out if/when Adobe plans to extend HTML overlay support for wmode=direct in Windows browsers. The linked page only talks about Chrome up to 10 and FF up to 4, so more progress may have already been made since the doc was last updated.
If I find out something useful I'll add it to this answer, until then it's probably safest to assume you need IE 9+ on Windows to support direct+overlay.
We are finding that most browsers support HTML overlay when wmode="direct" - however no browser is able to support transparency overlayed on top of the flash. Not even PNGs can alpha blend correctly. Any pixels that have an alpha channel and ignore as if there was no pixel at all.
When creating UI to layer over the top of flashs we have to "blanket out" the SWF - or - use rectangular DOM elements (ie, no rounded corners)
Furthermore - IE 9 on Windows 7 and older version simply fail to overlay anything over the flash. Iframes seem to pierce the SWF, but HTML elements do not.

How to check if browser supports css3 rounded corners and svg

Basically i have web site where i want to check if client browser supports rounded corners and svg as well and if not i want to show the message that for best user experience is better to use the latest browser.
So how could i check for that?
UPDATE:
I just found such library called Modernizr, is it possible to us that to check for that things?
I'd recommend using Modernizr; I've found this the easiest way to detect features: Modernizr
On a side note, you can provide some CSS3 features to IE users by using CSS3 Pie. This includes an HTC file on the page that replicates these effects: CSS3 Pie

Generating browser side web page thumbnails

I want to generate a thumbnail of a web page in the browser, so I can have multiple scaled down iFrames within a single page.
IE can do this using filters. Mozilla can do this inside a <canvas> with drawWindow() if you have Chrome privileges (like an installed plug-in).
Is there any way to do this in WebKit? Is there any generic cross browser way to do it?
I know you're looking for a client-side way to do this, but considering the spotty support across the board you may want to look into generating the thumbnails on the server.
khtml2png allows you to generate webpage images from the command line. It's not the prettiest solution, but with a little scripting it would allow you to generate thumbnails on the fly, and you wouldn't have to worry about browser compatibility.
WebKit's nightly build (41944 from March 24 2009) has support for transforming elements (including scaling) as well as other goodies like CSS gradients.
There is more information on the WebKit blog and here.
I'm guessing this features are also available in Safari 4 but I haven't checked.
edit: It looks like this is also making its way into Mozilla as -moz-transform.

Displaying vector graphics in a browser

I need to display some interactive (attaching with DOM listeners etc. and event handling) vector graphics in web site I am working on. There is a W3C recommendation for SVG though this format is still not recognized by Internet Explorer support of which is a must (for a public website). IE handles VML though and there are even javascript libraries that do some canvas-like drawing depending on a browser (SVG vs. VML) - excanvas, GFX of Dojo Toolkit and more. That would be nice and acceptable though none of them can display an SVG image from the given markup.
So the question actually consists of several parts:
Are there any cross-browser Javascript libraries that display vector graphics from given markup (not obligatory SVG) and offer availability to attach to DOM events?
If there are not, which of the most pupular browser-embedded technologies would be most suitable for doing such a task? I can choose from Flex/Flash, Java applet. Silverlight is not an option because of Windows lock-in.
[EDIT] Thank you all for your comments/suggestions. Below are just some my random notes/conclusions on this matter:
The level of interactivity I need is ability to detect DOM events on the vector image being displayed - mouseover, mouseout, click etc. - and ability to react on them like changing background color, displaying dialog etc.
The idea of sticking with SVG format is quite well as it is native on many browsers except the most popular one - IE. After some experimenting with displaying dynamic SVG I realized that IE version 7 the most problematic. There's too much hassle because of browser incompatibilities.
Cake seems a great Javascript framework, though I could not get the examples working on IE7.
Java Applets - I liked that idea the most as I though I could use the Apache Batik library, a quality SVG renderer. However, Batik is very big library and I cannot afford deploying an applet that weights few megabytes.
I decided to stick with the Flex option. I found a nice vector graphics library Degrafa. It uses its own markup format however it recognizes SVG path notation, so in my case it is going to be quite easy to transform my SVGs using XSLT or just parsing them.
[EDIT 2] Some more comments appeared. I'd like to clarify that by "Windows lock-in" I mean the situation that Silverlight would normally run on Windows, more specifically, IE. I doubt it is an accepted solution (like Flash or Java Applet, for instance) on other systems. Yes, I have no doubt that one is able to launch Silverlight app on any system though I fear it would be too much effort for an average user.
#Akira: Have you had any problems with those "SVG renderers" on IE7? I get thrown Javascript errors all the time.
Safari, Opera and Firefox all support SVG natively (eg. without plugins) to varying degrees of completeness and correctness, including the ability to script the svg from javascript.
There's also the canvas element which is now being standardised in html5, and is already supported in the above browsers as well (with various quirks in certain edge cases due to relatively recent changes in the html5 draft).
Unfortunately any standards based approach is kind of destroyed by IE's willful disregard of what is happening outside its own ecosystem, however there are a number of libraries that try to convert canvas/svg into VML (IE's proprietary vector language) such as iecanvas.
[Edit: whoops, i forgot my favourite js library -- Cake! which can parse and display svg in canvas, and believe supports IE as well]
[Yet another edit: Cake actually has a demo doing what i think you want to do]
Take a look at the Raphael Javascript library. It's early days but it looks very promising.
I remember the IE roadmap that had SVG support listed in IE7.2.
Depends on how interactive you want it?
Can you clarify what you mean by the "Windows lock-in" thing with Silverlight? It runs on Windows and MacIntel, and the vector portions run just fine on Linux with the Moonlight plugin.
Were you thrown off by the lack of Amiga support?
Have a look at the new Canvas element which has been implemented in many browsers. I heard also that there is an ActiveX control for IE that implements the Canvas element too.
Update: Wait, you already said that. I should read the whole question next time! :)
Walter Zorn has a JavaScript library for arbitrary vector graphics. It looks decent.
IE supports VML, but nothing else does and it's ugly. Microsoft claimed that they'd dropped it (with new XAML and all) but it's still part of their Office XML format (it's how Excel .xlsx supports comments, weirdly enough).
FX and loads more support the new Canvas element. Many support SVG, but given the work MS are doing on Silverlight I can't see IE supporting SVG any time soon.
Microsoft are supposed to be providing Silverlight plug ins for no MS operating systems.
I've been using Flex - it's pretty good despite using Eclipse. You don't need to buy the hugely expensive Adobe server components to use Flex - it can consume SOAP services.
The dev tools for Flex are quite affordable, and nearly everyone has Flash.
I don't think SVG is a good choice for the future. From Wikipedia:
"The most common IE plugin was produced by Adobe. Adobe, however, are planning to withdraw this product at the beginning of 2009"
"... Internet Explorer which will also not support SVG in the upcoming version IE8"
"...all have incomplete support for the SVG 1.1..."
"The Corel SVG Viewer plugin was once offered from Corel. Its development has stopped."
Of all the possibilities you list, the only one that's not a horrible abuse of an existing technology (Javascript), barely supported (SVG, Canvas element) or a lot of work (Java) is Flash. It was designed as a vector graphics package and is compatible with more browsers than SVG and the canvas tag.
The only reason I wouldn't choose Flash over all other options is if you're aiming at mobile browsers or don't have the budget for the Flash package.
Go for SVG - and just tell the users to get the ADOBE SVG plug in for IE.
See this excellent site - which is a UK Government Site (public service)
ELGIN