Question

Can someone please explain the philosophy behind Raphael (and other framework) animation? In a classic opegl or direct animation,flickering is reduced by rendering the next frame to a back plane and then blitting it to the foreground. Is this how JS animation works? Or does the browser somehow take care of erasing old frames/objects before rendering new ones?

Answer 1

Note that Raphaël uses SVG (or VML in Internet Explorer) to display data, not the Canvas or other techniques which directly render pixels. Since the vector objects managed by Raphaël have a distinct Z-order, drawing updates flicker-free is the job of the implementation and has nothing to do with the JS Library.