[whatwg] Canvas v5 API additions

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012, Charles Pritchard wrote:
> On 3/28/2012 2:41 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > > Currently, authors can create a large canvas, and place it in a div:
> > > >  <div style="overflow: hidden">
> > > >  <canvas>This can is larger than the div</canvas>
> > > >  </div>
> ...
> > >  The idea here is to enable scroll with limited height/width canvas layer
> > >  to work well.
> > >  
> > I don't really understand the use case here. Could you elaborate?
> 
> 
> Canvas authors often minimize the amount of memory they use in applications by
> limiting the number of layers and the width and height of the Canvas.
> 
> The following code is meant to explain, it is not valid code.
> 
> Where in HTML, we may have a div with scroll overflow:
> <div style="width: 300%; height: 100%">My presentation of things</div>
> 
> In Canvas we will often use a canvas with virtual overflow [synthetic scroll
> bars]:
> <canvas style="width: 100%; height: 100%"></canvas> then synthetic scroll bars
> and we repaint the canvas.
> It's quite a bit easier to simply use native scroll bars, but native scroll
> bars have many quirks across vendors.
> 
> The easier route is usually to use a div with native scrolling and a larger
> canvas:
> <div style="width: 100%; height: 100%; overflow-x: scroll'"><canvas
> style="width: 300%; height: 100%"></canvas></div>
> 
> For some cases, it would be nice to have synthetic overflow better integrated
> with the browser and apis:
> <canvas style="width: 100%; height: 100%" onscroll="repaint(this.scrollLeft,
> this.scrollTop)"></canvas>
> 
> Setting scrollLeft or scrollTop would trigger onscroll() as it does for other
> overflow elements.
> The semantic is available.

Just have the canvas positioned to not scroll in the div, and the div 
sized to be whatever size the original content is, and repaint the canvas 
when the user scrolls the div. Or, implement custom scrollbars or other 
scroll mechanisms in the canvas itself, if that's really necessary. 
Admittedly, I haven't tried either of these techniques myself, but they 
don't a priori seem that difficult to set up. I don't think we should be 
adding new features just to make this easier, at least not without more 
compelling evidence that it is a hard problem to address.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'