Probably the biggest limitation is, that once a shape gets drawn, it stays that way. If we need to move it we have to redraw it and everything that was drawn before it. It takes a lot of time to redraw complex frames and the performance depends highly on the speed of the computer it's running on.
We can not only draw new shapes behind existing shapes but we can also use it to mask off certain areas, clear sections from the canvas (not limited to rectangles like the clearRect() method does) and more.
Before we look at the transformation methods, let's look at two other methods which are indispensable once you start generating ever more complex drawings.
The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML, XML and SVG documents. It provides a structured representation of the document as a tree. The DOM defines methods that allow access to the tree, so that they can change the document structure, style and content. The DOM provides a representation of the document as a structured group of nodes and objects, possessing various properties and methods. Nodes can also have event handlers attached to them, and once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed. Essentially, it connects web pages to scripts or programming languages.
The Fullscreen API provides an easy way for web content to be presented using the user's entire screen. The API lets you easily direct the browser to make an element and its children, if any, occupy the fullscreen, eliminating all browser user interface and other applications from the screen for the duration.
Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript is notorious for being the world's most misunderstood programming language. It is often derided as being a toy, but beneath its layer of deceptive simplicity, powerful language features await. JavaScript is now used by an incredible number of high-profile applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web or mobile developer.
Briefly, double equals will perform a type conversion when comparing two things; triple equals will do the same comparison without type conversion (by simply always returning false if the types differ); and Object.is will behave the same way as triple equals, but with special handling for NaN and -0 and +0 so that the last two are not said to be the same, while Object.is(NaN, NaN) will be true. (Comparing NaN with NaN ordinarily—i.e., using either double equals or triple equals—evaluates to false, because IEEE 754 says so.) Do note that the distinction between these all have to do with their handling of primitives; none of them compares whether the parameters are conceptually similar in structure. For any non-primitive objects x and y which have the same structure but are distinct objects themselves, all of the above forms will evaluate to false.
JavaScript classes are introduced in ECMAScript 6 are syntactical sugar over JavaScript's existing prototype-based inheritance. The class syntax is not introducing a new object-oriented inheritance model to JavaScript. JavaScript classes provide a much simpler and clearer syntax to create objects and deal with inheritance.
Before we can start drawing, we need to talk about the canvas grid or coordinate space. Our HTML skeleton from the previous page had a canvas element 150 pixels wide and 150 pixels high. To the right, you see this canvas with the default grid overlayed. Normally 1 unit in the grid corresponds to 1 pixel on the canvas. The origin of this grid is positioned in the top left corner at coordinate (0,0). All elements are placed relative to this origin. So the position of the top left corner of the blue square becomes x pixels from the left and y pixels from the top, at coordinate (x,y). Later in this tutorial we'll see how we can translate the origin to a different position, rotate the grid and even scale it, but for now we'll stick to the default.
Increasingly, web-enabled devices are capable of determining their orientation; that is, they can report data indicating changes to their orientation with relation to the pull of gravity. In particular, hand-held devices such as mobile phones can use this information to automatically rotate the display to remain upright, presenting a wide-screen view of the web content when the device is rotated so that its width is greater than its height.
Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. In JavaScript, regular expressions are also objects. These patterns are used with the exec and test methods of RegExp, and with the match, replace, search, and split methods of String. This chapter describes JavaScript regular expressions.
There are several properties you can look at in order to determine the width and height of elements, and it can be tricky to determine which is the right one for your needs. This article is designed to help you make that decision. Note that all these properties are read-only. If you want to set the width and height of an element, use widthandheight; or, the overridingmin-widthandmax-width, andmin-heightandmax-height properties.
WebVTT is a format for displaying timed text tracks (e.g. subtitles or captions) with the <track> element. The primary purpose of WebVTT files is to add text overlays to a <video>. WebVTT is a text based format, which must be encoded in UTF-8 format. Where you can use spaces you can also use tabs.
Object-oriented to the core, JavaScript features powerful, flexible OOP capabilities. This article starts with an introduction to object-oriented programming, then reviews the JavaScript object model, and finally demonstrates concepts of object-oriented programming in JavaScript. This article does not describe the newer syntax for object-oriented programming in ECMAScript 6.