Topic: Canvas Tag: What do you think?

What do you all think of the canvas tag?

I have just started looking into this and it looks like a very interesting addition. Not fully supported, as it is not supported by IE. But something like excanvas provides an interesting workaround for it.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Dan
Code Town | Zombie Head | How Much TP?

So it's kind of like the GD library in PHP, but with HTML and Javascript?

I'm all for it, as long as they support it across the board (which, judging by historical examples of things "supported across the board," would mean that it would most likely be severely broken in at least one major browser). I've always been a fan of the GD library, and it would be nice to have that function client-side.


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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

It's kind of like inferior SVG, with the added bonus of being non-standard.

2-3 years from now, when it was an Apple proprietary thing, I was skeptical, to say least. But now that it is implemented in 3 browsers I must say that :

Canvas is the shit!*

Granted it's not SVG, or Flash, but it allows for fast programmatic animations with rotations, scaling, blending modes, ...

... not to mention 3D Canvas

reisio: Well, it's not a W3C standard but the WHAT WG is laying it down and extending it greatly. Hopefully the W3C will adopt it for HTML5 and kinda force MS's hand to implement it.

^

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illustrated by the screenshots from a 3d snake implementation done by our own Mathieu 'p01' HENRI

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Hey... I thought you were ours. =)

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"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it." Mark Twain

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poi said:

Hopefully the W3C will adopt it for HTML5

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Hopefully not, but they did let HTML 5 in, so I'm not optimistic.

NoJive: I'm no one's and anyone's.

reisio: Anyway, Canvas has a public specification, an active WG, and several implementations are already in place. As for the relation between the W3C and Canvas, it could also land in the W3C's Web Applications WG, which would make a bit more sense as this group focuses on pratical things necessary, or useful, for web applications.

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reisio said:
Hopefully not, but they did let HTML 5 in, so I'm not optimistic.

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What do you mean by "let HTML5 in"? The working group has not yet decided on the starting point for the next
version of HTML. Most likely though, it will be based on the work that has been done by the WHATWG. Anything
else would be illogical in my opinion. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you join the working group and
raise a formal objection.

As for canvas, I haven't played much with it myself, but I know for sure that there are some seriously cool stuff
that can be done with it, having seen a demo by poi. I hope you all get to see it some day, you won't believe your
eyes.

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HZR said:

What do you mean by "let HTML5 in"? The working group has not yet decided on the starting point for the nextversion of HTML. Most likely though, it will be based on the work that has been done by the WHATWG. Anythingelse would be illogical in my opinion.[

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Gee, then I guess that is what I meant by it - y'think?

I don't understand why all this "why do we need canvas when we have svg?" mentality has sprung up everywhere. The canvas element is just a dynamic version of the img element - a fixed size raster image canvas. Additionally, it has a graphics API that can compete with GDI (in fact, it's in several ways superior), which is one of the things that were really missing from the original capabilities of JavaScript in the browser. That graphics API could have been placed on the img element instead, but that suggestion was shot down mainly because the canvas element has better semantic clarity and better fallback support.

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OK, I'm a bit confused. Isn't SVG a vector format? And yet the entry on the canvas tag at Wikipedia says its a bitmap format. That's why I first thought it was like GD (which is also bitmap). Is that information incorrect, then? Or maybe I just don't understand SVG...


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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

you're correct, Suho.

And while SVG is a good idea for data representation and the like, it's no way suited to fancy effects..

SVG and Canvas serve different purposes.

SVG is 99% about vectors, supports text and events, is both declarative and programmatic, have animation/filters/blending modes/scaling/transformations...

Canvas is 80% about bitmaps, do NOT support text, is only programmatic, have blendings modes/scaling/transformations/pixel precise manipulation/export as PNG capability...



(Edited by poi on 05-10-2007 20:11)

though export-as-bitmap should be something any svg platform can easily support

Agreed!

But animated SVG can be tricky, I guess it should export the current frame, alas some implementations of SVG might not "wait" for the export to continue the animation, resulting in an image showing slices of time frames.

Ah, I see... thanks for the info.

I imagine it will take a few years for everything to get sorted out to the point that we have a reasonable cross-browser/platform solution.

Hooray, the W3C's HTML WG have accepted Web Applications 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 as the starting point of HTML 5



(Edited by poi on 05-14-2007 10:31)