[whatwg] Still beating the drawString() dead horse...

[Martin Atkins]

Stefan Haustein wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have tried to sum up the requirements for 
> CanvasRenderingContext2D.drawString() at
> http://rhino-canvas.sf.net/www/drawstring.html
> 
> The page contains an API proposal based on the Font/TextStyle object 
> approach that
> meets all those requirements, and also some motivation why I have 
> implemented this
> approach and not one of the alternatives discussed here.
> 

Some comments:

--------------------

void drawString(in float x, in float y, in DOMString text);
  ...
attribute DOMString verticalAlign;
attribute DOMString textAlign;

I'm guessing from the function signature that what is actually changing 
here is how the coordinates (x,y) relate to the rendered text. a 
textAlign of right will presumably cause the text to be drawn with the 
rightmost edge at x.

However, it'd also be useful to be able to render formatted blocks of 
text, like this:

void drawString(in float x1, in float y1, in float x2, in float y2,
                 in DOMString text)

...which wrap text and would make a textAlign of "justify" meaningful. 
Suddenly a bunch more CSS properties become attractive (margins and 
letter spacing, for example) but I think line-height alone would do for now.

Rendering formatted blocks of text seems to me to be such a common thing 
that the canvas API should support it natively.

This does, of course, require more functions on TextStyle to measure the 
extent of a block of text. This could probably be confined to just the 
following:

float getBlockHeight(in DOMString s, float width)

--------------------

I think that a good use-case for this would be replacing regular 
document elements with canvases, either using bare script or using XBL. 
You point out in your document that drawElement(e) is tricky, but for 
limited cases it would be nice to be able to obtain the computed style 
of the canvas element to use for rendering, so that the text can match 
the style of the surrounding document.

This can be as simple as one method on the canvas context to fetch the 
computed style, which would presumably return null in a non-browser 
implementation of the API.

CanvasTextStyle getInheritedStyle();

For example, this could be used to create some kind of visual effect 
(fancy headings?) or to render a graphical element from some XML 
namespace that isn't supported in browsers yet.