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[?Placement of this paragraph? DM''] The HTML <canvas> element allows the programmatic delivery of graphics in a web page without plugins. With its inclusion in the soon to be released IE 9, the <canvas> element now represents a means to deliver graphical content in all the major browsers. The typical way to interact with the canvas is to use JavaScript. However for artists, educators, and other people less familiar with JavaScript, learning to do this can be a barrier to entry.
The Processing language introduced by Ben Fry and Casey Reas is a simple and elegant language for data visualization that is already used by artists, educators as well as commercial media to deliver rich graphical content called sketches. There is a large body of work around the world which is being developed using Processing. However, Processing was developed in Java and thus delivering Processing sketches on a webpage required that the user install a Java plugin. Furthermore the sketches themselves are self contained items as opposed to being part of a web page. That is, the elements of the Document Object Model (DOM) of a webpage can not interact with it or vice versa. Thus, while it is possible to deliver visual content it would be difficult to create Processing sketches to take full advantage of modern web services such as flickr, twitter etc.
