HTML5 And The Times We Live In

As part of my college course we do HTML 5. We also do a subject called Avant Garde as I may have mentioned. I am new to HTML5 but as with everything practice makes perfect. The Canvas element in HTML5 surprised me as in a lot of ways it is more similar to flash than HTML 4 in my opinion. We were given a simple lab on how to animate some images, making them appear on the Canvas using a simple for loop.

For my Avant Garde assignment I’m going to be concentrating on Emigration figures. We were advised to start ‘making things’ as soon as possible so I married both concepts. After some quick googling I grabbed a simple timer code from Neil Broderick. I also grabbed some pictures of passports and passport holders (to add some colour). I married these with a modified version of the lab code.



The Result can be seen Here

Explanation: The timer starts a function that places 5 passports a half-second/10 a second randomly on the page, so 600 a minute 65’300 / 600 is 108.833, so 109 minutes roughly. The opacity is set so the patterns gradually build up. I find sometimes these demonstrations can get reality across a lot better than simple facts. 65’300 doesn’t seem like a lot but when you see it portrayed graphically and consider every one of these is an individual, most forced to leave the country due to the economic situation it hits home harder. If I get the chance I might add the code to let you save the canvas as an image.

If you do for some Bizarre reason leave it running for the duration it won’t stop, this is as although we have a new Government in Ireland, we haven’t yet sorted the Emigration problem, as a matter of fact 100’000 are estimated to Emigrate in the next two years.

Hence the title, HTML5 And The Times We Live In.