[whatwg] Canvas lack of drawString method

[Mathieu Henri]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:16:33 +0200, Charles Iliya Krempeaux  
<supercanadian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Alfonso,
>
> On 10/17/06, Alfonso Baqueiro <abaqueiro at gmail.com> 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?

Canvas does have text capabilities for the sake of simplicity.
Add drawString and then you need stringOnPath, clipping, styling of the  
texts, multiline strings, full support of unicode, ... and then you end up  
with a programmatic only version of SVG.


> I believe that some people's reason for not wanting to add it was  
> because of Accessibility concerns.

But if a user agent do no support Canvas, it MUST fallback to the  
descendant tags of the Canvas.
There you have the accessibility mean.


> Although normal text in a webpage... or even a text image (with the "alt"
> attribute filled in properly) could be "read" by a person with  
> disabilities, text embedded in the canvas element could not.
>
> Perhaps people need to think about how to add Accessibility to the canvas
> while allowing a "drawString" procedure.

It would easy to use DOM methods to grab the texts to display in the  
fallback content of the Canvas tag. Provided that the fallback markup is  
exposed to JavaScript in the user agents that support Canvas.





-- 
Mathieu 'p01' HENRI
JavaScript developer, Opera Software ASA