Summary

In the chapter we got started with 2D rendering using the long-awaited canvas API. We looked at the various drawing functions available to us through the canvas rendering context, which includes drawing simple lines and shapes, drawing images from an external image source, pixel manipulation, and image extraction, which allows us to save the image from the canvas back to the user's file system.

We also looked at the new threading system available to us through the web worker interface. This allows us to free up the user interface thread, while we perform long lasting tasks that would otherwise lock up the interface, and cause the browser to display a non-responsive page alert. Unfortunately, there are a few limitations to web workers, since there is no shared memory between workers, and no DOM associated with, or allowed in a worker thread. Still, much can be done with this magnificent new feature of HTML5.

The other HTML5 specific API that we covered in the chapter was the offline...