We are making progress in learning HTML5 technologies – Javascript and CSS – to make interactive web apps. Web app experiment 1, in the Resources section of this site, has been updated to feedback control of water level in a tank. We used the desktop app MACAW to graphically layout the main components of the web page and generate the HTML and CSS files.  Then we did some editing of the files generated by MACAW and added a link to our Javascript file.

We wrote the Javascript code ourselves. The Javascript code makes the web page interactive by getting user input, doing the computations, then updating the display. One thing we have discovered is that Javascript runs very fast in today’s browsers. Many years ago we compared the speed of computation of Javascript to some other languages and found it very slow. That situation has changed dramatically.

We are pretty happy with MACAW. It definitely speeds up the process of learning CSS and laying out a web page.  One very nice thing is that it generates standalone HTML and CSS files – you do NOT have to link your site to a proprietary library.