[whatwg] I believe source rectangles for HTML5 Canvas drawImage are specified incorrectly

[Kevin Gadd]

A simple way to create an Image that represents a subregion of another
Image or Canvas would be a nice solution here, since for
implementations that need a temporary image anyway this lets them
ensure it's only created once, and it lets you avoid the costs
associated with temporary canvases. A few questions come to mind,
though:

Will it be possible to accept a canvas as the first argument instead
of an Image?
If you have a few live references to subregions of a larger image,
will that prevent browsers like Chrome from discarding the decoded
pixels? The fact that Chrome discards unused decoded image pixels
helps keep memory usage low for HTML5 games, so it would suck if this
API change prevented it (and other browsers) from doing that
effectively.
Will creating the subregion imply a copy and the associated garbage
collection overhead? If so, API consumers would probably end up having
to create some sort of caching library to keep cached copies of
subregions around, and then those cached subregions might leak
forever. I think what you'd want here is for it to be a reference to
the subregion within the existing image, which means if it's a
reference to a subregion of a canvas, when the canvas changes the
subregion changes too. Would it break things for the semantics to work
that way - i.e. it is now possible for the contents of an Image to
change?
How would a new overload of the Image constructor be feature-detected in JS?
If this becomes the correct way to solve this problem, what happens to
existing implementations that provided alternative sampling behavior
(like Chrome)? Will they get changed to match the spec, breaking apps
until the new Image constructor is rolled out?

Also, the more I think about it, the more the garbage collection
impact of invoking a constructor for every blit seems like a potential
problem. Even in generational GCs like V8, allocating a bunch of
objects isn't cheap. Given that JS provides no way to hold weak
references, it wouldn't be straightforward to cache and evict Image
objects for each particular source rectangle used when drawing.

-kg

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:23 AM, Justin Novosad <junov at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:52 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Justin Novosad <junov at chromium.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What would be the next step? Should we define a new version of drawImage
>>>> with the extra parameter?
>>>
>>>
>>> That is one option, but I think a context attribute (like
>>> imageSmoothingEnabled) is also worth considering.
>>> Perhaps image smoothing could be an enum rather than boolean with an
>>> additional mode that prevents color bleeding.
>>
>>
>> It seems a bit too expensive to add a variable to the graphics context
>> that is checked for just this call.
>> Maybe just a new drawImage call (like drawNonSmoothedImage?) is all that
>> is needed.
>
>
> Yes. That sounds quite reasonable to me, but we can find a better name. The
> name "drawNonSmoothedImage" suggests that the image won't be smoothed at
> all, which is not the case.  It's hard to find a name that correctly
> describes the right behavior without getting too technical.  I am thinking
> "drawSubImage", in the sense that the sub region delimited by the source
> rectangle is treated as if it were a whole image.  This gives me another
> idea: we could just have a new Image constructor that creates a new image
> element that is a subregion of another:
> var mySprite = new Image(spriteMap, x, y, w, h);
> This can be implemented in a lightweight way that just references the data
> of the source image.
>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> If so, we probably want the description of the existing drawImage call
>>>> to change so it leaves the resampling issue undefined unless WebKit is OK
>>>> with changing their current behavior.
>>>
>>>
>>> IMHO: Undifined behavior is a spec bug. If we have a problem with the
>>> spec, we fix the spec, we don't just each do our own thing.
>>>
>>
>



-- 
-kg