That's awesome, thanks for showing me that. It would definitely be cool to implement something similar for browsers with SVG support, then fallback to the generated spans for those without.
That's really cool, I didn't know about that. Thanks!
The difference here is that with alphaPun.ch you're only clicking through the transparent parts of the image; the opaque parts still block clicks. If I understand that document correctly, pointer-events would only allow you to click through the whole image. (Except with SVG?) Is that right?
For the initial launch, my intention was to build something interesting using new HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript features and techniques. Now that it is launched and working in the browsers targeted by the contest (current Firefox, Chrome and IE10pp2) my goal will be to expand it to work with browsers that don't support all these features.
The limitations of the contest were that it must support current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and IE10pp2, which it does in this launch version. Now that it's working in those browsers, further browser support and better fallbacks are my top priority.
Yes, the fallback is not adequate for a general release tool, so maybe I should have waited before posting it here. But, I thought people might still find it interesting, and I wanted some feedback before submitting it for the contest.
Apologies to those that are being frustrated by these limitations at launch.
It lets you upload a transparent PNG or GIF and will trace the opaque parts. It then spits out some HTML/CSS/JS that you can put on your site that allows you to click through the transparent parts of the image.
Performance is a valid concern, but so far in the tests I've run I haven't hit any real problems. If you encounter any slow downs or real performance issues, I'd love to hear about them (and hopefully eliminate them!)
As a Safari user, I actually totally agree, and it was a hard choice to leave it out of the first iteration. The reason was that this was made for the 10K Apart contest (10k.aneventapart.com) and I was really, really struggling to get the code in under 10k. Having the extra functionality pushed me over the edge. I will definitely be making it support more browsers over time, and adding more options. Or, you could always fork it on github and add it yourself. (https://github.com/nwtn/alphapun.ch) :)