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Title:

The HTML 5 Canvas Element

Your vote:
Level:
Advanced
Type:
Panel
Category:
New Technology / Next Generation
Organizer:
Martin Kliehm, namics (deutschland) gmbh
Description:
Canvas is an element originally introduced by Apple to create effects like wet floor and cover flow in iTunes. It has been adopted by the HTML5 working group and subsequently been added by Opera and Firefox. There's also a library to emulate the behavior with SVG in Internet Explorer.
Martin Kliehm
on 8/8/08
This will be a dual presentation with Ernest Delgado who created some amazing experiments while working for Google and Yahoo! I’m preparing talks with a few exiting examples about that topic in September, so we will have some interesting cases to present! I believe in 2009 we will see more examples of this technique in the wild.

Questions answered by this panel will be:

1. What is the canvas element?
2. How do current browsers support it?
3. There are only a couple of attributes for canvas in HTML5. Where does the fine-tuning come from?
4. To what extent is it compatible with Internet Explorer?
5. Why don't you use Flash to achieve the same?
6. Apart from wet floor and cover flow, what else can be done with a canvas?
7. Are there any libraries to create the coordinates of polygons?
8. Is canvas more than a fad?
9. Is it possible to use JavaScript libraries like YUI or jQuery for events, effects, and animation in a canvas?
10. When there are hundreds of copies of an image, doesn't it use a lot of resources?
Dmitry Baranovskiy
on 12/8/08
“There's also a library to emulate the behavior with SVG in Internet Explorer” Doesn’t it use VML in IE?
Martin Kliehm
on 12/8/08
@Dmitry: Hah! There's the weak spot. ;-) To tell the truth I haven't bothered yet to experiment much with browsers that *don't* support canvas, but I will until September when I talk about that at a conference in Germany. I'm afraid it's VML in IE6, but it could be something better in IE7. Besides (Google) Gears started to implement canvas, that's pretty exciting!
Martin Kliehm
on 12/8/08
And of course VML is a predecessor of SVG, canvas copies a lot of behavior from SVG, so in a way it's all related...
Ernest Delgado
on 16/8/08
By then, we'll likely have more benchmarks about Canvas vs. SVG performance, and the "canvas 3D context" too. I'm excited to see that so many web developers are interested in such promising technology.
Dmitry Baranovskiy
on 1/9/08
Ernest, don't you think that comparing SVG and canvas is like comparing oranges and apples? For me, they are such a different technologies.
Martin Kliehm
on 1/9/08
Dmitry, although Canvas and SVG are different technologies and offer a different range of possibilities, there's an overlap in the browser context. Let's put it that way: many of Canvas' methods seem to be very much inspired by SVG. For example, transformation operations in a SVG viewport and a canvas element share the same parameters, even the operation names are identical.
last minute
on 18/5/09
Yes, great idea!
Do it today!
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