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>.

2006/01/02
Previously On Atomized:
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Discussion

I wish it was XML based shapes with CSS 3+ for shading, shadows, etc. and *then* javascript to *move* the shapes and play around.

Joe Stump
2006/01/05

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.

Ian Eure
2006/01/05

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