Mahemoff has just pubblished an article over at Software As She’s Developed comparing the different ways of client side rendering images:

The ability to create rich graphics on the fly is one of the critical gaps in Ajax. There are indeed techniques to do it, albeit far from perfect, and some are do-able today if you take a pragmatic view of things and keep graceful degradation in mind.

Here I list all the techniques I can think of to create graphics and images dynamically when you’re creating an Ajax/DHTML/Javascript web app, with varying degrees of portability and usability. Starting with the obvious and ending with the obscure. Please submit any other techniques you’re aware of!!!

He covers a total of eight different techniques and goes into detail about the problems and advantages of:

1. SVG
2. Canvas
3. Dynamic images from the server
4. VML
5. Richer Plugin (e.g. Flash)
6. CSS/DOM
7. data: resource
8. XBM

I see that there might be certain applications, but I don’t think that there will be a major move from served images towards client generated images, it just adds too much of a hassle.

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