On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 5:53 AM, Michael Norton <no...@me.com> wrote: > It seems that the canvas element could really help make this a reality. The > Editor's Draft I reviewed on the w3c site this week seems to suggest that > text and glyphs generated with accessibility-scale functions would not be > able to be easily edited (text) nor cut-and-pasted. Am I understanding this > correctly? If so, that's a plus for me as the data which would be utilized > to populate the digital spectrometer on the front end would be pulled from > other sources where editing functionality is authorized.
The last sentence seems unrelated to the rest of the paragraph. Editing a data source is a very different thing from editing a local copy of text on a webpage. There is no reason to worry about the latter when it's the former that needs authorization. Using <canvas> just to make less-accessible text is inappropriate. Similarly, lack of copy/paste functionality is disconnected from anything you might need authorization for at the data source level. If you can copy/paste, you can just type it out yourself, so you aren't preventing anything. Efforts to restrict or disallow copy/paste on websites in the past (stretching back to the early days of JavaScript) have always been that terrible combination of utterly worthless and completely user-hostile. Using <canvas> to try and restrict copy/paste is a fool's errand, and inappropriate as well. That said, using <canvas> to easily create cross-platform visualizations of data is a very worthwhile and appropriate thing to do. ~TJ
