The canvas element sucks
I’ve heard some rumblings about this newfangled <canvas> thingy, but I haven’t looked at it until today. I’m horribly disappointed. It feels like a throwback to the mid-90s browser wars, and presentational markup. I am not at all pleased.
And the thing’s interface sucks. Hard. It’s fundamentally a display thing, but you have to write code - JavaScript - to use it. Vomit.
The thing that really irritates me is that it does nothing that existing tech doesn’t. It’s a vector drawing area. Big deal. SVG can do everything <canvas> can, and there are already many tools which produce SVG files.
This thing sucks. It deserves to be relegated to the tech trash heap with <blink>.
January 5th, 2006 at 5:56 am
I wish it was XML based shapes with CSS 3+ for shading, shadows, etc. and *then* javascript to *move* the shapes and play around.
January 5th, 2006 at 6:15 am
Well, if you can get at the DOM of an embedded SVG object, you can manipulate it with JS, the same as sliding stuff around on a regular HTML document. Gradientes/shadows/shapes are just SVG constructs that you manipulate with the script - no CSS necessary.
That way, your data stays data, and the code stays code.