Question

My question is very simple.In adobe flash files(swf) you can actually capture the complete information and store it and later access it by running ht swf files.

Now HTML5 is considered to be a replacement of flash in html pages.So with HTML5 and javascript can we actually store the same data in someway and later access it ?

e.g.
Say I want to capture all the information where the user moved its cursor on a webpage.
I can do that with swf file(generated from say php) .So later if the owner of that webpage wants to see how a specific user moved his cursor on a page he can just see that flash video.

But How can I do it with HTML5 and javascript.

Answer 1

It really depends on what you want to do. In your example, you could use JavaScript to find the coordinates of the mouse at a specified interval, or when the user moves the mouse. You could then post that data to a PHP script with an AJAX call to persist it. The ‘playback’ would then just be a case of retrieving the data and displaying an animation on the browser. Obviously, this isn’t dependent on HTML5 at all.

A quick idea of how this could work using jQuery:

var mouseCoordinates = [];
$(window).unload(function() {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'POST',
        url: 'yourScript.php',
        data: { movements: mouseCoordinates },
        async: false
    });
}

$(".container").mousemove(function(e) {
    mouseCoordinates.push({x: e.pageX, y: e.pageY});
});

Obviously this is not a complete solution.