I'm prototyping a thin client UI using extjs and am looking for an effect that will simulate a form/pane flipping over to reveal another form/pane. Its for a details view for an object that has two major sets of properties.
I found a flex component that can do this, and can even simulate four different forms on the faces of a cube.
Just a sexier, more fun way of doing what you can already do with tabs.
This particular effect may not be available on a cross-browser basis quite yet. Doing perspective transforms on a given DOM element is only possible in two ways that I know of:
1) Renderer-specific extensions, like Webkit's -webkit-transform
2) Rendering the DOM element inside of a Canvas element and then doing transforms on that
The problem with #1 is that it's clearly not going to be cross-browser. The problem with #2 is that you'd more or less have to write your own complete markup renderer for canvas to really get everything in an arbitrary DOM element in there.
(OTOH, I wouldn't put it past some ambitious and clever JavaScript ninja to have attempted #2, so though I haven't seen it yet, I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone else can point towards something like it...)
I would stick with the tab solution if you want to get your project done within a reasonable time. This does not exist for ExtJS - the one in Flex does a 3D effect. The only solution close is to just have content in 4 cells of a table that slides into view (according to the direction of the arrow you used), within a DIV, and have the overflow property set to hide, so you can mask out the other cells and show one cell at a time. Then use the animation (fx) functions to slide the content in and out of view, perhaps with some arrows you hover over or click.