An Amazing JavaScript Port of HNTrends.com Using Raphael JS | Hacker News Reader

An Amazing JavaScript Port of HNTrends.com Using Raphael JS

mattmazur.com

34 pointsmatt16 comments

I believe HTML5's canvas is going to eat into a lot of Flash's less intensive applications simply because it won't be something you'll need to prompt the user to download if they don't have.

I think that graphs, menus, etc., are going to go HTML5+Canvas.

But I feel that Flash is still going to keep it's hold on Browser based games for a long time, since hardware acceleration is going to be a must for games that need more power then JavaScript can provide.

"But I feel that Flash is still going to keep it's hold on Browser based games for a long time, since hardware acceleration is going to be a must for games that need more power then JavaScript can provide."

That's where WebGL comes into play. Just give it a year or so.

It will take a while till kinks are ironed out (it's rather painful to use now), but already in its current state it looks quite promising.

With GLSL shaders you can achieve look and performance of desktop games from just few years ago:

http://alteredqualia.com/glearth/

If you dare to try Firefox / Chrome / Webkit nightlies (#), here is current state-of-the art of plugin-less browser graphics:

http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/

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(#) http://khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementation

IE, Firefox, Chrome (probably Opera and Safari also) already have hardware accelerated graphics in their preview/beta/whatever builds. And just like ActionScript, JavaScript is JITed nowadays.

Link to the actual page http://hntrends.timepurge.com/. It is pretty cool.

It would be great if it was updated so that the links could be opened in background tabs with a mousewheel click like normal links (as of this writing mousewheel doesn't work for me to open new links - FF 3.6.3). I'm a flash developer but one thing I can't stand about flash is the inability to open links in other tabs.

This page pretty much freezes my FF 3.5 solid, which is highly unusual.

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