[NTLUG:Discuss] Website design questions

[Steve Baker]

The possibilities for making animations that run on the client machine
without resorting to GIF are many:

1) You can load and display movies using Ogg/Vorbis and MPEG4/H264 video
using the <video> tag.  These are streamed from the server - so they
start up quickly.
2) You can use the <canvas> API in JavaScript to do really complex 2D
animations.  These can be incredibly compact.
3) You can use the new WebGL stuff with JavaScript to do full-scale 3D
animation with lighting and texturing.
4) You can use SVG animations...also really compact.
5) You can play with DOM parameters in JavaScript to move text and
pictures around, change styles, etc.

...Flash is *so* yesterday!

These new goodies are utterly amazing - but some of them are very new. 
The latest Chrome 9 (which went gold today!), Firefox 4 (beta) and some
releases of Safari support all of them well - but older browsers and
Internet Explorer won't be able to do all of those things.

  -- Steve

On 02/03/2011 08:30 PM, Fred wrote:
> Anyone want to have a go at answering some rather basic questions 
> about website design concepts? I put a site together and it works, but...
>
> That is about all I can say for it.  Basically, I made the home page and 
> figured that I would not proceed farther until I got that part right. The
> concept, which sounded good at the time, was to forego flash and
> use an animated gif image as the background image for the page.
> The biggest problem is the gif file size. At almost 2 megs it takes way 
> too long to load the home page. So it is time to back up and start over
> since I don't believe that this can be fixed.
>
> Which brings me back to the beginning: anyone want to spend a little 
> time talking with me about the finer points of web design? 
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Fred
>
>
>       
>
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