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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T05:11:06+00:00

I’m trying to build a website that looks the same (or at least very

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I’m trying to build a website that looks the same (or at least very similar) even with different resolutions. I know it’s a pretty simple thing to do with Adobe Flash, but I’m kinda trying to get into the whole “HTML5 scene” so I thought I could try building it without using flash at all.

I know I can resize the canvas to fit the window of the browser it’s being viewed in, but can I also resize images, text and other HTML structures that I place inside the canvas? Like s, s, s or images?

I’m also going to be animating a lot of stuff within the website itself, so I thought I could ask you guys first if you think it’s doable with just HTML5 (canvas) or if I should just use Flash instead.

I know this isn’t the standard “help me debug this” help post, but it would really help me out if you guys could share some knowledge.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As it’s not a direct question I’m not feeling obligated to give a direct answer, but I have been looking into this myself as well lately since there is just so much hype about HTML5. Although it’s slightly off topic Ted Patrick came to my work recently to promote sencha touch and Ext.js which is who he’s working for at this point, but anyhow it was sort of a downer for me as I’d read some of Ted’s posts about Flex when getting into it myself. Anyhow sob story aside here’s some resources that will help:

    http://www.sencha.com/
    http://www.htmlfivewow.com

    I haven’t used ProcessingJS yet myself, but I have used Processing itself in the past for making data-visualizations of serial data read from an Arduino (based on sensor input, again getting off topic), and processing itself is very close to Flash with regard to drawing:

    http://processingjs.org/

    I think if you want to do this really quickly you’re probably going to want to just rely on your current skill-set. If you’re not worried about pushing this out quickly, spend some time researching more HTML5/Javascript/CSS3 tools/frameworks/constructs/books. Honestly HTML5 itself is sort of nil in my mind, the major changes are to CSS3 with regard to transitions and the DOM objects with regard to the new Canvas WebGL WebSockets etc. Problem is not every browser is implementing these new rules the same way (similar to HTML4 and before) so there’s still going to be some checking for browsers and fall-backs necessary. With regard to HTML5 itself from what I read essentially a scan of existing sites was done for id attributes and things that were very popular as ids for divs have now become their own tags, mostly for the benefit of search engines, screen readers, and other technologies that could take advantage of understanding the meaning behind sections of your page (semantics). The other thing this allows it to do is take care of things like localizing timestamps and things of that nature. From demos I’ve seen I don’t doubt that you can achieve similar if not better results using HTML5 and javascript however just like writing a web-application using just AS3 without Flex or any other frameworks you’ll have your work cut out for you.

    Also some potential pitfalls to be aware of:

    1. Have to write browser specific code (also known as waste of time).

    2. Performance is not as great as it should be given the amount of negative light shone on Flash with regard to performance. I’ve seen simple HTML5 examples that run like garbage even using Google chrome which has the best javascript virtual machine called V8 and uses Web-Kit (same HTML rendering engine as Safari but they vary in versions). Point not being Javascript is any worse than AS3 with regard to run-time performance, but it’s not some magic hammer that does everything right even if you give it to a monkey (assuming the monkey is not trained to use a hammer).

    3. Be wary of Video codec issues/compatibility across browsers (if you’re dealing with video content).

    4. Explore your options with regard to server side technologies in advance of getting started (this ones not really a pit fall but it could be if you don’t take the advice). Node.js seems fairly promising as an option (I don’t believe it’s necessarily robust enough for the faint of heart, but if you like to code and see everything going on it’s a nice way to keep everything in a single language… sort of), alternatively you can use AMF to JS converters to keep using BlazeDS. Also be aware of the extra over-head introduced by using JSON instead of AMF3 serialization, it’s not a huge deal in the high bandwidth world we live in, but given the ever increasing mobile world (and shotty mobile networks) it’s something to consider (to be fair on this point gzipped Dojo JSON, whatever the heck that is, seems to be almost on par with AMF3).

    http://www.jamesward.com/census2/

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