[whatwg] [canvas] imageRenderingQuality property

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On Jun 2, 2008, at 2:39 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
> That's exactly what i would be afraid of people doing.  If I have a  
> fast system why should i have to experience low quality rendering?   
> It should be the job of the platform to determine what level of  
> performance or quality can be achieved on a given device.  Typically  
> such a property would be considered a "hint", and as such would  
> likely be ignored.
>
> If honouring this property was _required_ rather than being a hint  
> you would hit the following problems:
> * Low power devices would have a significant potential for poor  
> performance if a developer found that their desktop performed well  
> so set the requirement to high quality.
> * High power devices would be forced to use low quality rendering  
> modes when perfectly capable of providing better quality without  
> significant performance penalty.
> Neither of these apply if the property were just a hint, but now you  
> have to think about what happens to content that uses this property  
> in 18 months time.  You've told the UA to use a low quality  
> rendering when it may no longer be necessary, so now the UA has a  
> choice it either always obeys the property meaning lower quality  
> than is necessary so that new content performs well, or it ignores  
> the property in which case new content performs badly.

If web apps misuse the property, then bugs should be filed on those  
apps that incorrectly use the property, and the app developer should  
fix them.  The web platform shouldn't prevent developers from  
exercising control over how their content is rendered; most  
developers, as you say, probably shouldn't change anything from the  
default 'auto'.  But the capability should be there.  Arbitrarily  
deciding what developers can and can't do isn't interesting from the  
perspective of creating a full-featured platform, IMO.

No matter how fast smooth/bilinear filtering is, something more  
complex is always going to be slower, and something less complex is  
always going to be faster.  If those perf differences are significant  
to the web app, no matter how small, you're going to want to be able  
to have that control.  If they're not, then you should just be using  
'auto' and let the UA handle it.

     - Vlad

> On Jun 2, 2008, at 2:15 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
>
>>
>> Sure; bilinear filtering is slower than nearest neighbour sampling,  
>> and in many cases the app author would like to be able to decide  
>> that tradeoff (or, at least, to be able to say "I want this to go  
>> as fast as possible, regardless of quality").  Some apps might also  
>> render to a canvas just once, and would prefer to do it at the  
>> highest quality filtering available even if it's more expensive  
>> than the default.
>>
>>   - Vlad
>>
>> On Jun 2, 2008, at 12:25 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
>>> Um, could you actually give some kind of reasoning for these?  I  
>>> am not aware of any significant performance issues in Canvas that  
>>> cannot be almost directly attributed to JavaScript itself rather  
>>> than the canvas.
>>>
>>> --Oliver
>>>
>>> On Jun 2, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to propose adding an imageRenderingQuality property on  
>>>> the canvas 2D context to allow authors to choose speed vs.  
>>>> quality when rendering images (especially transformed ones).   
>>>> This is modeled on the SVG image-rendering property, at http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/painting.html#ImageRenderingProperty 
>>>> :
>>>>
>>>> attribute string imageRenderingQuality;
>>>>
>>>> 'auto' (default): The user agent shall make appropriate tradeoffs  
>>>> to balance speed and quality, but quality shall be given more  
>>>> importance than speed.
>>>>
>>>> 'optimizeQuality': Emphasize quality over rendering speed.
>>>>
>>>> 'optimizeSpeed': Emphasize speed over rendering quality.
>>>>
>>>> No specific image sampling algorithm is specified for any of  
>>>> these properties, with the exception that, at a minimum, nearest- 
>>>> neighbour resampling should be used.  One alternative is to  
>>>> specify 'best', 'good', 'fast', with "good" being the default, as  
>>>> opposed to the SVG names; I think those names are more  
>>>> descriptive, but there might be value in keeping the names  
>>>> consistent with SVG, especially if that property bubbles up into  
>>>> general CSS usage.
>>>>
>>>> - Vlad
>>>>
>>>
>>
>