This is a classic toy program in that you would never do this in the real world unless the code were written programatically, which ain't no big thang (thing for you shankers out there in Shank High school hacking with a miserable caulf. It might be radiation poisoning. Maybe a bad burn from too much radiation from being too plugged in all of the time?

I like this because it is a fun little deal. I still don't 'understand' how the coordinates work yet fully enough to be able to craft things that aren't partly crafted, and partly accidental. It is a lot like making woodworking on a lathe to craft these items here. This one I like quite a lot, it was easy to make. But it is architected all wrong. Not purposefully wrong as a toy, however. As a toy you can see that it is a toy and that it is harmless and happy for love and joy and internationally community of cures and hope and eternal love, eight leopards protecting eight very much loved children for eight wonderful happy happy joy joy families.

In any case this is a good first step to controls that don't just lay there dead on the screen.

Tested on Firefox. Cell phone browsers on Android phones don't always render the images correctly. This works in Chrome as problems with various non-conformant code were corrected (JavaScript is a loose language, some things break in one browser and not in another. I think more in a C++ or PHP dialect where there are many other language features that make coding just a little bit different. I am working on fixing the issues with this demo. But try this one too: Coming to a browser near you.

There are many things that are difficult about this model. I need to approach the problem freshly and see if I can better do what I had concieved to do. I am not able with this model to determine the hub location for the array of objects, and thus the rotation is not from the center of the hub of sections (which are rotated around a common center).

There are some tools that would help me here. First would be some controls that allow me to set and modify various locations more easily. I can then hook those up to some functions that place the figures into the three-d space in a controlled way by crafting the transformation to place the object in ordered ways. This will allow for experimentation on how the placement of various block elements effects the three-dimensional layout of spans.

This model was crafted from another model which was just a toy demonstration program as well. In order to create three-d layouts of block objects to model real world things it is better if one has a program that will allow placement of objects by eye. And then one can fathom what the values are to align things exactly and tweek things into position. One could come up with a dublicate object mirror function that would allow one to place another object of the same kind in a mirrored position. Always, though, we are dealing with content, too, that might be contained within these objects.

The biggest problem with CSS is the lack of precision of knowing the effects of all of the various overlaying (cascading) styles. One might think that one has over ridden some style, but then one discovers that there is some other layer in which the thing of concern resides. And the styles are so ubiquotious and show up everywhere. We need to keep coming up with ways of having namespaces for our items so that when we tweek position styles we don't destroy things in other places that use those same styles. Unless one fully understands the effects of the cascade, the changing of something in one small place will result in a cascade effect that erodes the quality of the page. There is a level of every object being adressed uniquely with an id label. When we are positioning things it is often best to do the positioning like that. Each positionable item needs a unique name. But what if we have sheets where there are items in side of them that are similar but not the same? As there are no rules about what the class and id must be for these highly mutible things, the mutibility of them means that some types of mutation result in a cancer on the page and the page is thus effectively unusable. CSS is so mutable that the correct use of it is an oxymoron. Unfortunately the ubiquity of the corporate model that drove the web to this kind of design meant that CSS was the constantly morphing project that is always ballooning outward and trying to consume everything else. Clearly for the positioning of flat block and panel things in a 3D space html5 and css3 are the way of the future for a lot of content. But the VRML and SVG methodologies of markup will give a far more precise model with which to work. Utilizing those types of markup might be far more fruitful for people for doing design. And then one needs to create a shim that would render the vrml or svg, (or whatever three-dimensional modeling language one would like to use) in the browser and just have the html include it as a content entity (with the embed tag)

OK, so we have been able to do that for years. So why don't people just do that? Well,they do. And they use flash. But then with that svg or with that vrml model how do we then change it's content with RSS? I am sure that it is done and that people do it. Interesting questions. On this page we are strictly using html5 and CSS3 so . . . we can do anything to the graphic that a web page allows. The surfaces of each of the spin blocks gauge numbers could be any manner of complex web page with animated content. And, assuming one has the processor power to do it, it ought to render for you.