>I confess I wrote a bunch of Java applets back in the day
Heh. Nothing to confess. Before the HTML5 set of standards (circle 2008), there were certain things you just couldn't do in the browser with JavaScript. That's why there was space for plugins like Applets, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, etc. I did quite a bit of Flash/AS3 (along with the Flash wasm/asm precursor named 'alchemy') development back in the day. If I was able to do it with JS/HTML/CSS I would have done that instead - but you just couldn't.
Heh. Nothing to confess. Before the HTML5 set of standards (circle 2008), there were certain things you just couldn't do in the browser with JavaScript. That's why there was space for plugins like Applets, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, etc. I did quite a bit of Flash/AS3 (along with the Flash wasm/asm precursor named 'alchemy') development back in the day. If I was able to do it with JS/HTML/CSS I would have done that instead - but you just couldn't.