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.
Related
So I'm looking at a specific application for a web browser which requires me to express color as a straight alpha channel with a black and white alpha channel as a separate element. (an example of both types
I know many moons ago, IE supported some perverse filter options, but since I'm doing css3 transforms, I need this to work in a modern browser, preferably Chrome.
Basically what I'd like to do is have an element with CSS transforms applied, specifically rotation most likely, then I'd like to take that and copy it to another equivalently sized element which has the black / white transformation applied. An additional bonus would be setting the original element to use straight alpha, but I can live without that for now.
I haven't been able to find any routes with which to start investigating. If you have one, I'd be super grateful. My last resort is to start doing things in WebGL or Canvas and modifying the output there.
Two or three different elements stacked on top of each other using absolute positioning and z-index? This would require you to save two different images which I'm guessing you're trying to avoid.
You can do CSS 3D transforms. Browser support is basically there in newer IE, Chrome, Firefox, iOS and Android.
where can you use them
how to use them
MDN
I've actually figured out the answer... it's CSS Shaders.
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/FXTF/raw-file/tip/custom/index.html
Not yet available, but soon.
The reason not to use Canvas is for simplicity in authoring. (Long story.)
I have to create a pretty complex map which is divided in pieces, which themselves are each pretty complex polygonal structures. These are given to me as transparent PNGs. Obviously i can't just use the rectangular PNG itself to define each mouse-sensitive area.
First and last thing that came to my mind was using Image-Maps.
But before i go down that road, i wanted to ask whether anyone could think of a more modern solution to this?
Browser support requirements are IE >= 7, FF >= 3, newer Chrome & Opera. So usage of CANVAS might not be an option.
When designing web documents, you should always choose the thing which come closes to expressing your intent, so that your documents are most adaptable to use-cases you didn't think of.
An image map is entirely appropriate for placing links on map images. <canvas> makes your document less interpretable. SVG would be a reasonable choice if it fits your data well, but is less widely implemented than image maps.
SVG would be a good choice, there are plugins to add compatibility for ancient IE versions. There's nothing really wrong with maps, just make sure it's really clear where the links go as the status bar doesn't have the info like a normal link.
IE7 won't do SVG or Canvas (unless you like plugins as Mr. Bradshaw points out), and while VML might work there, it is a quagmire. You could use some javascript to compute point-in-polygon on mousemove. But really, image-maps (either client-side or server-side) will probably be the simplest approach.
I'm working on a site that uses images diagonally aligned. The images are fairly simple and have some text inside so I can achieve the effect using either images or the CSS3 transform: rotate and border-radius properties, granted, with all the proprietary extensions.
However I'm wondering if there are significant advantages for using one over the other. I'm thinking maybe the CSS-only alternative would load faster, but a downside would be the use of more code for each image. Although using images I'd still have to do a lot of positioning for each element. Also, the CSS in the first case would not validate using browser-specific extensions, how important is this if I still make sure the site is correctly displayed in most browsers?
Is there a general approach for using either one of these options? What would you recommend?
The use of CSS3, versus images, is best answered by your need to support Internet Explorer (or other older, or CSS3-unaware, browsers): if a large portion of your user-base browses with IE then you should use images.
If you're only interested in the later, more standards-compliant, browsers (possibly including IE9, but I've no experience with it as yet) then CSS 3 is likely the better option, since it might involve a larger CSS file, but it does allow you to switch your layout more easily in future, without having to create/recreate a new set of images for the new design.
You could, of course, combine both approaches: use CSS 3 for the compliant browsers, but include an IE-specific stylesheet, with conditional comments, to supply the images as, perhaps, background-images to build up the design. This is, of course, likely to be a lot of work, though.
I would honestly recommend an image for this. CSS3 is cool, but browsers that don't support it might break your layout. Also (possibly more importantly), text really needs proper anti-aliasing to be readable when rotated or scaled, and you can get finer control over that with an image.
Two things I think you should consider here:
Images are a killer for those on mobile devices. So if you are targeting those with mobile or expect a large mobile audience, you may want to reconsider using a lot of images (and having your users pay a ton in bandwidth).
The text in your images (if you use images) will not be searchable by search engines and will not be accessible for those with accessibility issues, unless you are good at filling in your alt tags. ;-)
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.
I've been reading a lot of ways recently of how to avoid having to use Photoshop for things like gradients and shadows on buttons, when you can use CSS3 Box Shadow for such features. Now this is great, but obviously legacy browsers and most IE browsers don't yet implement CSS3 features, so my question is, why save yourself extra work in Photoshop when you can use CSS3 but then HAVE to use Photoshop for other browsers to see the desired effects? Isn't that just extra work?
you can use CSS3 but then HAVE to use Photoshop for other browsers to see the desired effects?
Often you don't really care whether the other browsers see the desired effects. If it's just a subtle background gradient effect, the site's going to work fine and still look reasonable with a flat background in downlevel browsers.
Compatibility was more of a problem when CSS 2 Positioning was at this stage: an unsupported positioning feature could lead to an unusable layout. But for essentially frivolous effects like backgrounds, borders and shadows, it's not critical if the effect goes missing.
There are a few reasons. From a developer/designers perspective, using CSS3 can be more flexible. An image is more or less just a static image. With CSS you can use script or CSS to animate or adjust the styling, and have advanced integration between the various technologies. This allows you to be able to do some things that are not possible or difficult just using images.
The page weight is also lower usually when using CSS, which allows the page to load faster, especially on slow connections or mobile devices. It also reduces HTTP requests (although you can use data uris too) which reduces latency and thus speeds up page loading.
Using CSS is often more maintainable and quicker, as you can adjust say a background colour or a shadow quickly just by changing the CSS, while with images you have to open up photoshop, edit the file, resave, etc. This is fantastic for quick tweaks.
There are also some people (myself included) that are much more comfortable in code than they are using graphics packages. For me it is easier to use CSS, but your milage may vary.
Also from the browser perspective we want to move the web platform forward and increase the capabilities. SVG is an example of another technology that doesn't work across all browser versions yet, but adds a lot of power. Although it may not be possible to deploy sites using certain CSS3 properties or SVG without fallbacks right now (depending on your audience or client) there will be a time in the future when old browsers are dead and what we are adding today works for all users. There was a time when most of CSS2.1 wasn't supported for example, while now you can rely on most of it if you don't need to design for IE6.
There are some parts of CSS3 that you can happily use without fallbacks, if you have a client that doesn't require all browsers to look the same. border-radius is an example, or giving a solid colour fallback to old browsers and applying transparency for newer browsers.
The world is moving forward, you can't ignore it. as long as old browser will show a button and new browser will show a more nice one, you are ok.
Otherwise, we were still be working on VT100... as why using "Windows" if most monitors doesn't support more than 4 color graphics and has 80X22 resolution....
If your bosses accepts the idea of having two versions of looks and feel and a warning. CSS3 is a good idea.
So, you use CSS3 features in your code and forget about the browsers that are not compatible -- they will see the "low-graphics version", you might want to issue a non-intrusive warning (like the one we get as alerts in StackOverflow), saying, "Your browser is not compatible with CSS3. To see this website in high graphics please upgrade your browser. Click the link here to update now."
But, depends on where you work. Big companies with lot of resources may like to stick with Photoshop and smaller once may like a light-weight CSS3 code that degrades silently in non-compatible browser.
Well you can always use ChromeFrame, to impose nice behavior on IE. Assuming that a lot of products will insist for it the near future (yeah we can argue against this), chances are that most IE users will have chromeFrame even before your application would insist for it. Once you take a decision on this, decision on using CSS3 properties or HTML5 elements is - well - hell yeah!!
Marvin