Inside Technique : Cursor Trails
By Matthew Allum

The first thing I ought to tell you about 'cursor trails' is that they perform nothing useful. They don't improve navigation and they don't add any functionality, but they are fun and entertaining for the user. There's also very little download cost involved, they work on both Version 4 browsers and they degrade nicely in older browsers.

The trail consists of a group of CSS layers which trail behind the mouse pointer, across the browser window, before fading away when mouse movement is stopped. To accomplish this, We'll take advantage of both browsers 'onMouseMove' event, use an array to keep track of the layers that make up the trail and introduce a basic object to look after the trail's fade.

On the next page we demonstrate the cursor trail and introduce how they were added to the web page.

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