CSS3 allows developers to implement simple graphics without using images.
For example this envelope gradient background:
Is there a way to generate a square-based ornament via css3. An example is slavik ornament like this:
I am not asking for an example, just if it can be done by setting a square color and position. Perhaps it is too complicated of an ornament and needs to be provided at least as svg image.
Look at those examples
http://lea.verou.me/css3patterns/
there are some complex ones there.
But be aware that this technique tends to be heavy on the cpu especially in Firefox.
You may also try to generate those using javascript in canvas that is positioned offscreen, capture its content as image and use that image for background. Here is an example how you can implement this
http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/advanced/html5-canvas-save-drawing-as-an-image/
Related
Supposing that I have a polygon image PNG file like this (No border, the shape is filled with one color, no gradient, and background of the image is transparent) http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/books/shapes/gifs/4.GIF
I'm thinking of using that polygon image as a background image and it will be changed (to another image with different color) when the user hovers on it.
But I also want the color of the background image to be customizable. So, I'm thinking if there is any possibility to draw the polygon instead of using image files so that the color will be customizable (I don't think it's a good idea to create one file for one color and so on so forth).
What is the best solution for this case? Using png or drawing it by css?
Is there a tool/website to convert my png to css code?
Make the white areas transparent (colour to alpha in GIMP)
Convert the image to a data URI (it's optional but it will make your site load faster)
Use the url in (2) as the background-image and use any background-color you want.
Use this to convert an image: http://codepen.io/blazeeboy/pen/bCaLE
I think it's much better to use converted images because browsers load them faster.
I think CSS is the wrong thing to use for this. Yes, it is possible to create a lot of shapes using CSS, but there are limitations, and in any case, drawing shapes with CSS is a bit of a hack, even when it's just a simple triangle.
Rather than CSS, I would suggest SVG is the appropriate tools for this job.
SVG is a graphics format for vector graphics that can be embedded in a site, and can be created or altered via Javascript directly within the site. Changing the colour and shape of a simple polygon is about as easy as it gets with SVG.
The other advantage of using SVG is that because it's a vector graphic, it's scalable, so you could display it at any size.
The only down-side of SVG is that it isn't supported by old versions of IE (IE8 and earlier). However, these browsers do support an alternative language called VML, and several good Javascript libraries exist which will work with either, thus allowing you complete cross-browser compatibility. The one I'd recommend is Raphael.js.
So a tiny (and very easy) bit of Javascript code instead of a very messy bit of CSS. Seems like a winner to me.
Maybe u could use this: https://javier.xyz/img2css/, the principle is to use box-shadow,it's fine if the picture is small, so u should consider performance
Trying to achieve something like this
http://attasi.com/labs/ipad/ which uses CSS transforms.
but using the Canvas object for greater compatibility.
Does anyone know if this is possible?
Take a look at three.js, it can render 3D using mainly WebGL, but it supports a subset of stuff with <canvas>, SVG and even the plain DOM - check this demo that uses the DOM renderer.
Here are demos using canvas. Some guy made this which shows it can do textured, animated game-like 3D with canvas.
Also, you may want to check out a particle engine and a tweening engine to go with that, plus stats like FPS.
I'm trying to make a wheel, which will be sliced into different coloured sections (kinda like a pie chart) but they may have extra elements on top of them, e.g., a stitched border across the borders at the side and an icon at the edge of each, etc.
So my question is do I just use css3 (examples: http://www.css3shapes.com/)
and then use something like http://css3pie.com/ for Internet explorer 6-9?
Or am I just better off doing it in Photoshop and slapping it on a div as a background image? And use absolute positioning for extra elements?
Which is the best practice?
I would (and do) use PHP's GD extension to create a pie chart based on input data, save the image generated by that, and optionally generate an imagemap so parts of the chart can be highlighted, have tooltips, etc.
I really wouldn't use CSS for drawing shapes. It's hacky at best, and can get really messy. Quite a few of the examples in the cssshapes site you linked to don't even work in Firefox 3.6 - which is still quite heavily used - let alone other older browsers, and in IE you'd really struggle; css3pie won't give you the kind of fine-grained control you'd need for a pie chart.
If you want to draw stuff on the browser using on the client side, there are a number of ways to do so without resorting to hacks like CSS shapes.
Both SVG and Canvas are relatively new technologies for placing and manipulating graphics on the browser. SVG draws vector graphics and Canvas is for pixel-based graphics.
Both of them are supported on a wide variety of browsers. The obvious exception being IE8 and earlier. However, IE does support an alternative graphics format called VML, and there are javascript tools for IE which allow it to convert both SVG and Canvas into VML, so you can use either of them and they will work in IE using these tools, which makes both SVG and Canvas effectively cross-browser compatible.
But if you're drawing pie charts, or similar sorts of things, my personal recommendation would be to use the Raphael library. This is a javascript library which works in all browsers, and can be used to draw and animate pretty much anything, including graphs and charts (it even has a separate graphing add-on library. See the demos on those two sites to see what it's capable of; I think you'll be impressed. (I certainly was)
Hope that helps.
I'm trying to create a trapeze like shape using any number of techinques so that it will be as much as possible. the shape i'm trying to create a shape like this:
(there will be content inside the shape [imgs & txt])
so far, the possible ways of doing that are: masking (webkit) and SVG effects on html content (firefox). but I cant seem to find any way to make this work with IE and opera.
So if anyone could show me how to do this, it will be greatly appreciated.
There are a few options for creating non-rectangular shapes using CSS, but they are all hacks. This isn't something that you'd normally expect to do using CSS.
The most well known technique is triangles made using borders. It is very much a hack, and would require using multiple elements for a single shape. I wouldn't suggest using it on a production site.
The other CSS solution I can think of would be to use an extreme border-radius setting to modify the shape of the box. This is less hacky, but won't work in IE8 and lower, so fails your criteria.
You say you've tried the SVG approach and given up on it because it doesn't work in IE8. It's worth pointing out that while IE doesn't support SVG, it does support VML, which is a competing vector graphics format. SVG is now standardised, so VML will fade away, but older IEs will continue to support it.
Therefore the solution I'd go with would be to use SVG by default, and VML instead on IE7/8. The good news is that there are several Javascript solutions which make this easy.
One is Raphael, which allows you to draw SVG/VML images using Javascript. Commonly used for real-time graphs, etc.
There are also a number of solutions which simply convert SVG to VML. For example http://code.google.com/p/svg2vml/. But there are several others available.
Hope that helps.
As you suggest, masking and SVG are the way to go. These will be supported in future browsers. If you must be backwards compatible with IE, look into the IE "filter" for CSS (google "ie filter").
Be forewarned: It's very unintuitive (compared to CSS3) and generally a bitch to work with. If your goal is to make the page look identical to the CSS3 version, it will be difficult and you're probably better off using images.
Is there any way to make ie (7,8) display a gradient AND a background-image on the same div?
The only way I got it working (but only almost) was by using two filters, one for the gradient and one using the AlphaImageLoader - but of course, then you can't position the image.
Declaring a background-image and gradient filter doesn't work, because it simply won't render the image - only the gradient.
Is there any (preferably non-js) solution to this?
If not, I'll have to resort to using a background image for the gradient as well, which isn't quite as nice but won't make much of a difference either...
I would say that adding a little unnecessary markup is the lesser of the evils here. Either that, or let IE-users live without the gradient.
Oftentimes getting your design to work is a trade-off between semantics, performance, standards and pixel perfection. Accepting that fact was hard for me, but it's made me a better front-end developer - I can work faster, and I can make decisions about what metric is important in a given case.