The slides that shaver and I presented at last Friday’s Mozilla Developer Day are up now.
As presented at dev-day, these slides nicely demonstrated support for Apple’s canvas tag, embedded in Mozilla as <xul:canvas> and implemented using Cairo (a static PNG of the clock and animated stars must stand in for now, in the published slides, but you can view source to see the starbar.js script and related source). Thanks go to vlad and stuart for their heroic efforts hacking up <canvas> support.
As vlad pointed out, you can think of <canvas> as a programmable image tag. In that light, it’s reminiscent of the XBM images generated using <img src="javascript:genxbm()"> tricks developed by Bill Dortch back in the Netscape 2 era. All of which is to say, we really should have implemented this kind of tag in 1995, but both the management and hacker cultures then at Netscape deferred to Java for programmable graphics and other such features. What’s ironic is that this left most web designers reaching for Flash, not for Java, as the browser and Java-in-the-client wars played out.
The WHAT Working Group is considering standardizing <canvas>, with the goal of interoperating implementations based on the standard. My hope is that this is done both well, and quickly, in keeping with the WHATWG charter.
People ask about how SVG in Mozilla and <canvas> relate. The short answer is that they don’t, except that both must work well in all dimensions (complete and fast alpha-blending, e.g.) on top of a common graphics substrate, which looks likely to be Cairo.
A longer answer could compare and contrast <canvas>‘s non-persistent, procedural, PostScript-y rendering API with SVG’s declarative markup and persistent DOM. The upshot is that SVG and <canvas> complement one another, catering to fairly distinct requirements and authoring audiences.
One crucial fact to keep in mind: <canvas> support is tiny compared to the implementation of any known profile of SVG, so it will be easy to justify adding <canvas> support to default builds of Mozilla products. SVG should be supported in the same way as XForms and other, bulkier implementations of standards not yet seen much on the web: as a one-click download-and-install package that extends Gecko. I’ve asked top hackers to look into generalized support for such Gecko extensions, based on XTF, with versioning and update management a la Firefox’s extensions.
I’ll blog separately about the other points of interest raised in these slides.
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