Sometimes you want to render a visual on the fly, or even animate it. Perhaps the visual is a complex path where the set of x,y coordinates dictate what to render. Or perhaps the visual is a graph ...

The five characters HTML5 are now an established buzzword, found everywhere on the Web and often given top billing in slides, feature lists, and other places where terms du jour congregate.

"The Canvas tag is a revolutionary advance in what we can do with web browsers," says author David Flanagan. "I really do think that the client-side graphics enabled by the Canvas tag has the ...