Having set a challenge for creating a fancy-pants animation using Xara, and seeing that the ensuing discussion mentioned the future demise of Flash on the web and the emergence of HTML5 as an animation platform, I decided to set myself the challenge of seeing what I could achieve with the tools available today. And so I created this short HTML5 Animation using only Xara Designer Pro X and Hippo Animator 2, a fairly simple and quite new software (ie, still needs some bugs ironed out) from a British company, Hippo Studios. Here is my animation:

http://beretgascon.fr/tg/html5_animation/

I have not tested this page on a mobile device, and if any of you have an iPhone or iPad that you could check this page on, I'd be grateful if you left your comments here about whether it is fully accessible or not. Please also check that the "Play again" link at the end works.

I am really quite pleased with what I was able to achieve with the lightweight Hippo Animator 2 and since I'm still inside the 30 day trial period, I highly recommend it to you to download and try it out for free. If you decide to buy it, I think it's only US$50 which, considering that HTML5 is in its infancy in the wider website world (not in the pro website world), it's almost certainly worth the investment.

The above link proves not only that HTML5 isn't rocket science with the right tools, but also that it's a piece of cake adding it to a web page created in Xara Designer.