Whither Canvas?

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 11:03 am

This world is but canvas to our imaginations. -- Henry David Thoreau

First support for the WhatWG canvas element was announced by Apple in Safari, then it was included in Opera and Firefox. A little while back, Emil did a cool hack with VML to produce a subset of functionality as canvas for IE. There was a rumor that google would release this or some other code as its Canvas for IE solution, and it sort of has, landing with a thud over at sourceforge with a Google Code imprimature.

There have been no apparent developments since then. It doesn't seem to have been widely tested, is much slower than canvas in Firefox, and has enough differences and functional gaps to make integrating it with Javascript libraries that build on the canvas tag somewhat difficult.

There don't appear to be any plans to support canvas in IE7, but things can change quickly over there, apparently. So, do you support canvas in IE with an impressive piece of late night hackery like Emil's work, or is support for canvas just not there yet -- a really nice feature not supported effectively for 90% of the web browsing public?

I'm leaning toward the latter. What do you think?

Technorati : canvas, firefox, ie

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   We’re working on a unified VML/SVG API for the dojo toolkit. It should land in the 0.4 release (it’s in the dojo subversion now under heavy development).

   Take a look at

   http://xdraw.org/dojo-dev/tests/gfx/test_dragcircles.html

   For one sample. There’s also an analog clock widget in the dojo demos in subversion.

   We currently don’t support canvas, but it would be great if somebody wanted to add it to our API.

   Comment by Gavin Doughtie, Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 11:35 am

2. 

   Hi,

   use a wrapper for the Canvas. If the IE implements the
   Canvas you must only change the wrapper.

   Example: http://www.openjacob.org/draw2d.html

   Object oriented graph/draw library for javascript.

   greetings

   Andreas

   Comment by Andreas Herz, Tuesday, November 21, 2006 @ 2:03 pm

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