On the new <canvas> HTML tag by Stefano Mazzocchi

Hello,

    Stefano Mazzocchi (of Apache Cocoon fame) writes in the blog  
story titled "On the new <canvas> HTML tag":

   Mozilla turned on the new <canvas> HTML tag, so I expect Firefox  
1.1 to have it.
<canvas> is a was first introduced by Apple in Safari for their  
implementation of the upcoming 'DashBoard' in MacOX 10.4 (aka Tiger)  
and now it's part of new, non-W3C effort to improve HTML for richer  
client-side web applications. It introduces the notion of an "image  
you can paint on" programmatically. People have been doing this with  
applets, then shockwave, then flash, then svg, now this. The trend is  
clear: smaller, leaner, faster to startup, more integrated in your  
environment (means real event interoperation with the page!), easier  
for DHTML designers to understand.

This leads me to think that <canvas> is going to be huge. By the time  
the new Adobe+Macromedia colossus decide the faith of flash+SVG, this  
little HTML tag will slowly make both suboptimal for many simple  
tasks they are used for today.

Also, <canvas> has the potential to become the new <iframe> for  
advertisers, making it harder for things like adblock to recognize  
adds and remove them (or maybe adblock will just need to be a little  
smarter and use DOM3 xpaths instead).

The other interesting thing is that <canvas> is somewhat proprietary  
and only Mozilla, Firefox and Safari implement it (maybe Opera does  
too but I'm not sure). Some people complained about this not 'being  
standard' (as in "W3C recommendation" standard) and this was the  
reply from one of the developers:

We are turning canvas on -- it's already on by now. Get over it.  
Nothing in a relatively new spec is set in concrete, but that does  
not prevent useful work from being built on it. This is how the  
Internet protocols, and then the web, were built. Welcome back to  
incremental innovation. The lull of six years of monopoly-induced  
stagnation is over.
That's big, bigger than the <canvas> tag, bigger than the <banner>  
tag or the <frame> tag.

It's the <img> tag, over again: "simplest thing that can possibly  
work" vs. "design by committee".

If you look at the market-share numbers, IE is still the undefeated  
king, but Microsoft wants to redesign the space of thin clients and  
add richer UIs (which is what mozilla wanted to do with XUL but never  
got that much traction, also because using mozilla as a platform is  
still bug hell) and is unlikely to promote small features increments  
as it did in the past (for example, the HTML design mode, later  
cloned by Mozilla in Midas, or the contentEditable attribute, never  
unfortunately cloned by mozilla :-( ). As a result, IE is now  
officially lagging behind as Microsoft is busy trying to change all  
paradigms in one shot with Longhorn.

Tell you what: I'm happy Microsoft is doing such a huge mistake. They  
think they are smart, they think they know where to go, they think  
people will follow them.

My experience tells me that incremental evolution is always better  
accepted by any ecosystem than radical revolutions. Thermodynamics  
shows that the entropy of a system is not increased if the change in  
state is reversible. Fighting information entropy is what software is  
all about, such "I know what's better for you" radical moves are very  
much likely to increase entropy than decrease it. Microsoft has tons  
of money to pour into fighting this entropy, but this smells like the  
original MSN plan back in '94, plan that Bill Gates was brilliant  
enough to stop before it was too late.There are no signs of that today.

Can a little <canvas> tag kill Longhorn? of course not. But this  
little new HTML tag is a sign that the ecosystem is now moving and  
that somebody with a 5% market sees enough value in this movement  
that can boldly scream "screw you" jumping on the Darwin bandwagon.

Thank you, little <canvas> tag, you'll be teaching a lot of lessons  
to a lot of people and you'll be making my rich-webapp-developer life  
easier.

     Source: http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/88

     - Gerald

____________________________
Dashboard Widgets & HTML5 Dev Group @ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ 
html-widgets




  
   


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