If you've been reading my blog, you probably know that one of the pieces of the web platform that I'm most involved in is the HTML5 Canvas . It's a very direct way of getting 2D (and soon 3D) graphics into web pages, and removes many of the barriers between developers and graphics rendering. One of the biggest roadblocks towards adoption of modern web tech such as Canvas is the lack of support in Internet Explorer. ExCanvas was an early attempt at providing Canvas support in IE, but it did so by translating Canvas commands to VML. This worked for simple static stuff, but was pretty slow, and definitely too slow for interactive usage. Microsoft does not support Canvas in IE7, and has stated that it will not be supported in IE8. For the past few weekends (and one frustrating afternoon trying to work around an IE bug ), I've been working on a native Canvas implementation for IE based on the same rendering core that's in Firefox. With an object tag, a bit of CSS, and (to work around another IE bug ) a single line of script, <canvas> elements in HTML just work. I'm excited that this experiment is working out, because lack of Canvas support in IE is one of the reasons people skip Canvas and instead turn to Flash and other plugin technologies. Canvas is just one piece of the full modern web platform, but because it's so self-contained, it lets us experiment with pushing the web platform forward even for browsers that have fallen behind (or t ...
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If you've been reading my blog, you probably know that one of the pieces of the web platform that I'm most involved in is the HTML5 Canvas . It's a very direct way of getting 2D (and soon 3D) graphics into web pages, and removes many of the barriers between developers and graphics rendering. One of the biggest roadblocks towards adoption of modern web tech such as Canvas is the lack of support in Internet Explorer. ExCanvas was an early attempt at providing Canvas support in IE, but it did so by translating Canvas commands to VML. This worked for simple static stuff, but was pretty slow, and definitely too slow for interactive usage. Microsoft does not support Canvas in IE7, and has stated that it will not be supported in IE8. For the past few weekends (and one frustrating afternoon trying to work around an IE bug ), I've been working on a native Canvas implementation for IE based on the same rendering core that's in Firefox. With an object tag, a bit of CSS, and (to work around another IE bug ) a single line of script, <canvas> elements in HTML just work. I'm excited that this experiment is working out, because lack of Canvas support in IE is one of the reasons people skip Canvas and instead turn to Flash and other plugin technologies. Canvas is just one piece of the full modern web platform, but because it's so self-contained, it lets us experiment with pushing the web platform forward even for browsers that have fallen behind (or t ...