I have recently been playing around with the new html canvas tag and seeing what its capabilities are, I’ve been quite impressed and it seems for drawing dynamic data this is going to be a real strong tool. You can also use it for animations which could mean this will replace flash, at the moment it is only supported in the latest browsers so is a little way off being available to all users however as most good developers will do, you can code a fall back if the users browser doesn’t support the canvas tag, either a description or an advisory message would be a good fall back.

Here is a clock I found that is used with the canvas tag and javascript. Have a look:


Older browsers will not see the canvas object, please upgrade to see.

Using the setinterval function every second it changes the canvas image, you can change the colours, widths, heights and even shapes to what ever you want.