I have to write a color picker in the near future and I wanted it to have those little gradients on top of the sliders that show you the effect that a slider change will have on the selected color. Consequently, I needed to create imageless gradients, in order to easily change them. My very first thought was creating many div or span elements in order to show the gradient. I rejected it almost instantly, for ovbious reasons (*cough* performance *cough*). My second thought was SVG for the proper browsers, and gradient filters for IE. As it turned out, inline SVG was too much of a hassle and I didn’t want to use Data URIs. My final thought was canvas for the proper browsers and gradient filters for IE.
Since I consider such a script very entertaining, I didn’t google it at all, I started coding right away. Time to have fun! 
After finishing it though, I googled it just out of curiosity and didn’t like the other solutions much (either the solution itself, or the code), so I decided to post it in case it helps someone. I also made a little test page, so that you may test out how it works. 
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