title: Interactive Floor Plans in HTML5
body: <p>I have to develop interactive floor plan navigator and viewer for apartment buildings, which will succeed its Flash-based predecessor.</p>
  
  <p>I am now in the process of evaluating techniques and technologies best suited to implement this in HTML5.
  I will have to support all common browsers (IE starting with 7).</p>
  
  <p>Requirements: </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The user is presented with several static outdoor views of the building, between which he can switch with a simple widget. </li>
  <li>They will be able to select a floor on this outside view. On mouseover (click for touch devices) the floor will be highlighted.</li>
  <li>Upon clicking on the floor you switch to a floor plan, which - again on mouseover/onclick - provides detailed information about the apartment.</li>
  <li>Some animations should be involved, but nothing too fancy.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I have been thinking of the options for implementing this.
  I will also need a quick way of selecting polygons for the floors (overview) an the apartments (floor plan) to allow non-developers to create new buildings.</p>
  
  <p>The options I came up with:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Use plain images and image maps for the layovers.</li>
  <li>Use canvas(utilizing Google's Javascript solution for browsers without  support). Load the image in the canvas tag and dynamically create the layovers.</li>
  <li>Use SVG </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p><strong>What is the best option for cross-browser compatability?</strong></p>