9
edits
Changes
→Introduction
==Introduction==
Games delivery requires fast, highly graphical, interactive, multimedia environment. To accomplish this game delivery , games delivered on a web page, have traditionally required some sort of browser plug-in. However due to security concerns and general wariness about plug-ins, delivering content/games in this manner is a barrier to access for some users. Furthermore, browser plug-ins are not available on browsers for all platforms. Even Flash, which is one of the most ubiquitous visual interactive environments, is not available for every browser. The HTML5 <canvas> element, standardized in ...(find citation) allows the programmatic delivery of graphics on a web page without plug-ins. With its inclusion in the soon to be released IE 9, the <canvas> element now represents a means to deliver rich graphical content in all the major browsers.
The typical way to draw on 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 web page 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.
