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Build a motion activated security camera, with WebRTC, canvas and Device Orientation

As a web developer, you’ve probably seen emerging HTML5 technologies and APIs like DeviceOrientation and WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications), and thought “wow they look cool, but they are only for hard core gaming, video conferencing, and other such stuff, not for my every day development”. I’m firmly convinced that taking advantage of these capabilities […]

webStorage: Persistent client side data storage

Until recently, the only ways to maintain a user’s data between visits to your site have been to store it on the server, or use cookies in the browser. Both present significant security challenges and quite a good deal of effort for us as developers. Cookies are designed for communication between the browser and a […]

2D Transforms in CSS3

One of the most powerful features of CSS3 are transforms, which allow us to take any element in an HTML document, and while not changing its effect on the page layout, rotate it, translate it (move it left, right, up and down), skew it and scale it. CSS3 provides both 2D and 3D transforms, but […]

HTML5 selectors API – It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for the DOM

In the infancy of JavaScript, there was little if any concept of an HTML document object model (DOM). Even though JavaScript was invented to enable web developers to manipulate parts of a web page, and in the original implementation, in Netscape 2.0, developers could only access the form elements, links, and images in a page. […]

Let the Web move you – CSS3 Animations and Transitions

Get yourself along to John Allsopp and Pasquale D’Silva’s workshop at Web Directions South: Animating Your User Experiences. A brief history on Animation of the Web If you’ve been developing for, or even just using the web for more than about 15 years, you’ll likely remember a time when animated effects were the bomb. Animated […]

Getting Sourcey – native HTML5 Audio and video

Hard perhaps to believe, but the world wide web began without an image element. That’s right, there was no way to include images as part of the content of a web page before Mosaic implemented them (here’s Marc Andreesen proposing the img element at the beginning of 1993). The img element ushered in the age […]

CSS3 Radial Gradients

Getting your head around CSS3 radial gradients We recently took a detailed look at linear gradients in CSS3. If you’ve not read that, you might like to spend a few minutes doing so, as the concepts are very similar, and I don’t spend quite as much time in this article on the fundamentals of gradients […]

Get off(line)

Taking your web sites and apps offline with the HTML5 appcache There’s a general (and understandable) belief by even many developers that web sites and web applications can only be used when the browser has a web connection. Indeed, this is routinely cited as one of the real advantages of “native” apps over web apps. […]

CSS3 Linear Gradients

It’s been a while since we posted anything particularly technical to the Web Directions blog, but that’s something we plan on changing. Here’s the first in a series of technical articles on CSS3 features (along with tools to help you lean and use them). We’re starting with linear gradients. We’ll take a look at where […]

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Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney