Communication between JavaScript and Flash’s ActionScript is a very useful feature. It has a lot of potential and possibilities are unlimited. Although you can use Canvas, VML and SVG controls from JavaScript, Flash can be another alternative. Not only you can use flash for image manipulation and graphics, it also allows video’s, MP3 and many other powerful controls.
I came across few useful JavaScript libraries, which are very handy to quickly add some jazzy effects on your website. If you ask: Why use a JavaScript library? I can do this in Photoshop! Simple answer is … not everyone knows how to use Photoshop and there is no reason to keep reformatting your graphic just because you want some special effects.
Ask not what framework can do for you, ask what you have to do for the framework.
When choosing a framework / library / API, don’t get caught up on initial jazz from the framework. I see many coworkers and friends jumping on the idea of using frame work because they saw partial demo or heard about the new technology. When choosing a framework / library / API, you should asses how much work you have to do to support the framework / library / API and NOT how much time you save because of the functionality offered by the framework / library / API.
ASCII art is a cleaver way of using text to represent one or many pixels of an image. It only works with certain font types because it requires each letter in the alphabet to take the same amount of space. ASCII art has been around even prior to modern computer.
CSS expressions are supported only in Internet Explorer browsers. Basically it’s a way to include JS result into a value of any CSS attributes. As we all know certain CSS attributes works less then perfect in Internet Explorer. For example one of my co workers Max Fortun and I were working on a tool and he wanted to have a submit button stay on the top right corner of the screen, even if the user scrolls down.
Michael Robertson has implemented couple of really cool web applications.
Not sure if you have noticed, but some sites on the web has been including a screen shot at search results pages (including this one).
I came across this while surfing on the web and thought it was very interesting. Basically it’s a CSS based gallery by Stu Nicholls which only uses CSS and no JavaScript.
If you browse around, you are most likely to see rounded borders on newly redesign sites. Before CSS, the only border known to man was just square border, and even that was a pain in the ass because you had to have a table inside another table and mess with cellpadding and cellspacing of two tables to get 1 pixel border.
Vector graphics are geometric modeling which represents illustrations. Because its just geometric data, the amount of data usually needed to draw a image is smaller compare to bitmaps. This technique is used when doing illustrations, doesn’t make sense to use for photos since photos represent more scattered out pixels and usually are without solid shapes or forms. There usually is a lot of interest in manipulating image data which you can do with Vector graphics since its just data vs. regular images which are bitmap, because definition for each pixel and is nearly imposable to reprogram over and over with high speeds in the browser.