[whatwg] Canvas lack of drawString method

[Gervase Markham]

Alfonso Baqueiro wrote:
> The canvas component is very promising, but the lack of drawString 
> method could be a great error for its success, this lack is a huge 
> limitation, how could you resolve this problem?

I've suggested this in the past as a solution to this problem: why not 
have a drawElement(elem) parameter?

That way, you could build an accessible, readable version of the content 
inside the <canvas> tag, as alternative content, and copy labels or 
anything else into the <canvas> itself with drawElement(label). So the 
same content serves both as the accessible version and the used version.

This would give us great flexibility, because the text you do have is 
controlled with all the power of the existing CSS and browser font 
model, obviating the need for font controls or font objects on the 
<canvas> API - which would inevitably be not as good as the CSS ones. 
And if browsers acquire downloadable font support, so does canvas.

I would speculate wildly that it might even be easy to implement too. 
After all, I'm sure browsers have the ability to render the contents of 
a <div> tag to a drawing buffer...

Gerv