I have recently been playing around with the new html canvas tag and seeing what its capabilities are, I’ve been quite impressed and it seems for drawing dynamic data this is going to be a real strong tool. You can also use it for animations which could mean this will replace flash, at the moment it is only supported in the latest browsers so is a little way off being available to all users however as most good developers will do, you can code a fall back if the users browser doesn’t support the canvas tag, either a description or an advisory message would be a good fall back.
Here is a clock I found that is used with the canvas tag and javascript. Have a look:
Using the setinterval function every second it changes the canvas image, you can change the colours, widths, heights and even shapes to what ever you want.
Are there not flash ones of these around already?
Yes there are, but with the demise of flash support now on mobile devices, iphone, ipad and the new windows 8 tablet, this canvas tag is a HTML5 element and will work on these devices and while it’s not fully supported in all browsers I think its the way things are going to go.