[whatwg] Canvas and drawWindow

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Erik Möller <emoller at opera.com> wrote:
> I bet this has been discussed before, but I'm curious as to what people
> think about breathing some life into a more general version of Mozillas
> canvas.drawWindow() that draws a snapshot of a DOM window into the canvas?
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/drawing_graphics_with_canvas#section_9

I think we should do it.  Being able to play with screen pixels
directly is useful functionality.


> I know there are some security considerations (for example listed in the
> source of drawWindow):
>
>  // We can't allow web apps to call this until we fix at least the
>  // following potential security issues:
>  // -- rendering cross-domain IFRAMEs and then extracting the results
>  // -- rendering the user's theme and then extracting the results
>  // -- rendering native anonymous content (e.g., file input paths;
>  // scrollbars should be allowed)
>
> I'm no security expert, but it seems to me there's an easy way to at least
> cater for some of the use-cases by always setting origin-clean to false when
> you use drawWindow(). Sure it's a bit overkill to always mark it dirty, but
> it's simple and would block you from reading any of the pixels back which
> would address most (all?) of the security concerns.

I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to do this better - we can know
ahead of time whether the window contains any cross-origin resources
that aren't cleared by CORS.


> I'm doing a WebGL demo, so the use-case I have for this would be to render a
> same-origin page to a canvas and smack that on a monitor in the 3d-world.
> Intercept mouse clicks, transform them into 2d and passing them on would of
> course be neat as well and probably opens up the use-cases you could dream
> up.
>
> So, I'm well aware its a tad unconventional, but perhaps someone has a
> better idea of how something like this could be accomplished... i.e. via SVG
> and foreignObject or punching a hole in the canvas and applying a transform
> etc. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

I think we should be closing the <svg>/<foreignObject> hole, not
expanding it as the primary way to smuggle in drawWindow
functionality.  ^_^

~TJ