For more than 10 weeks, I've been shining a light on the brilliant work of many talented Web designers and developers who have embraced the challenge of producing cool, cutting-edge, and beautiful Web sites using new technologies such as HTML5, SVG, CSS3, and JavaScript 5. And I've been pointing out the ways that these sites shine most brightly in Microsoft's latest version of its browser, Internet Explorer 9. As the Beautiful Website of the Day blog reaches its end, I think the time is right to mention the best one-stop site for learning and testing out the new technologies and IE9's key new features. And that site is Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive.

The Test Drive was originally aimed at developers who wanted a head start in building new sites and revising old ones to work better in IE9. It's still that; and it's a trove of informative documents, videos, applications, and links for such tech heads. It's also the home page for what are called IE9 "platform previews" -- the latest versions of the underlying IE9 code packaged into a bare-bones interface. But beyond all that, the Test Drive is just an awesome collection, suitable for anyone, of fun and impressive Web programming feats.

Web designers have always been acutely aware of the limitations of their medium: slow modems have limited the size and number of graphics used on web sites, and designers even once had to limit their graphics to a "web-safe palette" of 216 colors. However, the abundance of broadband and fast computers means that web designers have become less concerned about trying to squeeze every last kilobyte out of their HTML, CSS, JavaScript and image files.

But even with broadband, a smaller file size means a faster web site. And to help remind us that smaller can be better, two prominent voices in the web community -- MIX Online and An Event Apart -- sponsored the 10K Contest, which ran in this fall. Covered previously in this blog, the contest challenged programmers to come up with a web application that is under 10K in size -- that's including HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript code! The entries in this contest handily pulled off the feat, exhibiting amazing visuals and complex interactivity.

While Flash has long been the primary tool used by professional game developers to create online games, HTML5 opens up game development to web developers. Powerful browsers like Internet Explorer 9, with its graphics hardware acceleration and speedy JavaScript engine, can draw and animate graphics fast enough to deliver compelling, visually exciting games.

Entanglement, a game by Gopherwood Studios, takes advantage of the new possibilities HTML5 brings. It uses the HTML5 canvas element to control the graphics and Ajax (a combination of JavaScript and XML) to communicate with the Gopherwood Studios web server after each turn.

The 10K Apart contest mentioned here with increasing frequency has spawned a really impressive number of beautifully-executed HTML5 games. For my penultimate Beautiful Website of the Day post, I'm going to feature one more outstanding work that deserves attention and that takes advantage of some spiffy new technologies supported by Internet Explorer 9.

This game is called Lines, and it was created by Australian Web developer and JavaScript artist Dmitry Baranovskiy. The basic idea is to get five or more balls of the same color in a row. The game begins with a nine-by-nine grid of squares, three of which contain a colored ball. You take a turn by selecting one ball and moving it to a new empty square, so long as the destination can be reached by moving across only empty squares. After each move, three new colored balls are added to the grid. So it becomes harder and harder to move, as there are fewer and fewer empty squares and clear paths to them. But every time you are able to arrange five or more balls into a row, they're removed from the board, you score points, and no new balls are added. When the board is completely full, the game is over.

When a Russian computer engineer unleashed "Tetris" on the world in 1984, he couldn't have known how addictive the game would prove, or how many billions of dollars in lost productivity it would cost worldwide. But given how things played out, it's no surprise that -- like Asteroids, which I covered here a few days ago -- Tetris has been ported to virtually every platform known to mankind. And for those who did eventually tire of the original version, there are all sorts of other so-called polyominoes games on which to waste hours and hours of time.

Among these is a challenging and very enjoyable permutation called "Torus." It's built entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript, and thus "Torus" runs natively (sans plug-ins) in Internet Explorer 9. As the topologists among you will know, a torus is a particular kind of mathematical surface whose properties may be summarized this way: It's a donut. In the game of "Torus," you're not maneuvering objects made of two-dimensional squares into a rising wall. Rather, you're maneuvering objects made of three-dimensional cubes into a rising tower -- a cylindrical shape with a hole in the middle (not exactly a classic torus, but a topologically equivalent surface).

In today's world of increasingly complex websites that use increasingly powerful code to build slick interfaces, there's something quite refreshing about "Canvas Rider." It's a simple game with humble graphical pretensions, and it's based on the HTML5 canvas element. It's rendered incredibly well by Internet Explorer 9, which leverages your computer's graphics processing hardware.

The game involves guiding a stick figure on a bike over landscapes drawn with primitive pencils and paintbrushes. It's reminiscent of ASCII art and the earliest video games, and yet in a way it's also very sophisticated. You may only have two bike choices and a few basic keyboard-controlled movements (lean forward, lean back, turn around, go), but the way your stick figure responds to your guidance is uncannily lifelike. When you crash, you can almost feel yourself tumble down into that ravine or slam into that wall.

FrozenDEFENCE is an attractively designed tower defense game that builds on the power of the HTML5 canvas element. The object of tower defense games, which go back to Atari's "Rampart" (1990), is to acquire and deploy towers on a map in order to defend territory and destroy enemies before they make it all the way across the map. Eliminating enemies earns you virtual money to buy or upgrade towers; if a certain number get through, it's game over.

The most popular Web version (so far) is the Flash-based "Desktop Tower Defense." But Flash can be kind of a drag on your browser, and it isn't even available on some platforms. The beauty of FrozenDEFENCE is that it will run anywhere HTML5 and JavaScript run -- so it works well on advanced mobile devices that don't have Flash, in addition to all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer 9.

The holidays are upon us, and we all know what that means: More time for gaming! And so games will be my main focus for the next week.

Games often lead the way in exploring new technologies and pushing them to their limits, because players are always eager for newer and cooler experiences. But there's also a counter-trend in game development, namely "porting," or re-creating classic games on new platforms. Just as much as everybody loves discovering mind-blowing, browser-bending new games, they also love playing some of the old classics, and those are continually finding their way from platform to platform.

A particle system is a computer graphics model for convincingly simulating fluid or fuzzy objects such as flame, smoke, water bubbles, and the like. (The idea behind particle systems was dreamed up by Bill Reeves, a computer graphics artist, while working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) Parcycle is a beautiful rendition of a particle system that exploits some of the more interesting powers of the HTML5 canvas element and of Internet Explorer 9.

Parcycle presents a black page rippling and exploding with color, along with a set of sliders whose labels are imposingly technical: spread X & Y, end random - rgba, gravity & direction, and so forth. But they make more sense if you think of them in computer terms. For instance, "rgba" is an acronym for red, green, blue, and alpha, where alpha is the level of transparency. The sliders, which react to your mouse, allow you to control the various parameters that go into building the system. Mouse over the canvas, and watch the particles bloom. Then click sliders to your heart's content to adjust colors, spread, density, transparency, and other factors affecting the animation.

You are a sort of modern-day Rip Van Winkle. You've been in a state of suspended animation for 42 years. And someone named Frank has been waiting for you to awake. He knows that you have extraordinary psychic and telekinetic abilities, but that your memory is practically gone. And this has affected your telepathic abilities. Frank is going to monitor and direct your reawakening into physical and cognitive functioning; he will give you the instructions you need to make your way out of the lab in which you've been confined and toward recovering all your abilities.

This is the mysterious premise of VII, a game that gradually supplies you with the instructions you need in order to master the environment in which you find yourself, in your fragile and reduced state. The environment, built using the HTML5 canvas element, has been beautifully defined with advanced scripting techniques, which are processed at top speed using hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9. So you feel as though you're engaging real objects and testing actual gravity as you make your way from room to room and level to level. You gain more knowledge and telekinetic powers as you advance and master manipulating your virtual self. But what's the goal? Is there one? That's the mystery you're really pursuing.

The editorial team at Scientific American, the leading popular science magazine, teamed up with the Baltimore-based digital firm R2integrated to develop a site that is an informative and entertaining resource for exploring the human brain.

Called Brain Power: The Quest for Understanding, the experience opens with a rotating, transparent brain model ringed with a gold hoop displaying some essential facts. The animation is a combination of HTML5's highly flexible Canvas element, the fast and accurate graphics language SVG, and plain old text, all which look best in a hardware-accelerated, standards-compliant browser such as Internet Explorer 9. Click on the menu items up top to being exploring the site's rich content: "famous brains," "cerebral chase," "optical illusions," and "the parts."

One of the very first social networking sites, Myspace has evolved over the years into one of the Web's top sites for discovering and enjoying media, from music to photos and games to video. The site offers sophisticated tools for gathering friends, sending messages, and creating blogs, and the social dimension is still important. Indeed, millions of users make Myspace their online home. But the focus today will be on media, and in particular the site's fast-growing collection at Myspace Video.

In tandem with the release of Internet Explorer 9, Myspace has been transitioning to a new method of encoding and presenting videos. Some content -- for example, television clips and music videos supplied by third-party services -- is still managed by browser plug-ins. But many new videos, including movie trailers, user uploads, and most featured videos, take advantage of a new Web standard, the HTML5 Video container.