[whatwg] Text support in <canvas>

[Anne van Kesteren]

Quoting James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk>:
>> The introduction of the <canvas> is a GREAT start for higher quality 
>> graphics on the clientside. But whats missing is support for text 
>> rendering. Text is as important an element of graphics as the drawn 
>> shapes.
>
> Allowing text in <canvas> has serious accessibility problems. 
> Presumably such text would not be resizable and encouraging authors 
> to use non-resizable text in their web-apps is not a good idea. I 
> guess there would also be (separate) issues with fonts; one assumes 
> font substitution on a bitmap drawing would be more problematic than 
> font substitution where the text is the main content.

Another problem is that, since html:canvas does not have a DOM, the actual
content is not really accessible. However, I have seen people having to use
images with the alphabet inside html:canvas to get simple text effects. Making
that easier might be nice. (But addressing fonts, line-height, etc. might be
difficult.)


>> Also, adding text support will bring <canvas> to par with MSIE's VML.
>
> Isn't VML substantially closer to SVG (which supports text)?

Yeah, I believe so, see <http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-VML-19980513>.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>