The eye does not deceive: javascripted animation still has significant limitations. While it's perfectly suitable for image fades and graduated motion via jQuery or similar packages, more liberal applications tend to cause the jitters.
At the heart of this is a lack of graphics operation handlers - helper functions to assist processor-intensive math and graphics-array operations before they reach a bottleneck. Such co-processing operations are a cornerstone of rich media plug-in technologies like Flash and Silverlight.
In spite of this, it's interesting what can be accomplished with development kits like Processing. An open source animation suite and "electronic sketchbook for developing ideas," Processing has gained many followers in the realm of academia, while the down and dirty commercial market continues to patronize plug-in solutions.
With browser capabilities on the rise, there is a huge upside for better native animation in future browser versions. Consequently, the open source community is poised to gain more animation and graphics programming devotees.
Update: Google's Chrome is on the move with native graphics processing in javaScript. Have a look at this example via drawlogic that uses the HaXe (pron: 'hex') version of the Sandy library. You will need to launch Chrome to see it. These are some bold smoke signals for Adobe to heed.
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