I would also throw in that you should focus on the performance of the Canvas API if you were trying to get it working with Gears, since there is already an open source JavaScript library named ExCanvas that gets Canvas working on IE but its slow.
Best, Brad [email protected] On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Nigel Tao <[email protected]>wrote: > > Yeah, the image/canvas world is indeed in limbo. :-( > > You're right in that HTML5 isn't final, but overall I think it's > pretty stable, especially with respect to canvas. For a year or more > now, there are three existing canvas implementations in stable, > shipped browsers: namely Safari, Firefox and Opera. There's enough > deployment that makes breaking backward compatability highly unlikely. > > It might seem like re-inventing the wheel to implement a Gears canvas, > given these other implementations, but the motivation for the Gears > canvas was to fill in the gaping hole (i.e. Internet Explorer) in the > list of canvas-enabled browsers, and to also provide Gears-isms like > canvas import from / export to blob, so you can do things like canvas > renderings in a worker thread. > > Given that, I think that canvas is still the better API, even though > you're probably right in that the imaging API is probably easier and > simpler. > > As for a list of action items (i.e. features) to implement, I think > it's simply "whatever bits of the HTML5 canvas spec are missing". > There are plenty of "Unimplemented"s in > canvas_rendering_context_2d.cc. A nice test suite under gears/test/ > manual/canvas would also help. The text-related and shadow-related API > are probably more a nice-to-have than a must-have-for-launch, and I'd > drop the API additions in canvas_rendering_context_2d.cc (e.g. > convolutionTransform, medianFilter, adjustHue, etc.) since they're > unproven, and not necessary for an initial launch. > > As for what is required to get this released, I think if a good- > enough, self-consistent feature set is implemented (and thoroughly > tested) then I would argue for release. The main problem at the moment > is simply that nobody is working on completing the feature set. > > If you are willing to write the code, then I will be willing to do the > code reviews, and to land your patches. > http://code.google.com/p/gears/wiki/ContributingToGears >
