[whatwg] Adding 2D Canvas features (Was: Grouping in canvas 2d)

[Justin Novosad]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:

>
> On Jul 3, 2013 4:38 PM, "Justin Novosad" <junov at google.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Tom Wiltzius <wiltzius at chromium.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Mark Callow <
> callow.mark at artspark.co.jp
> > > >wrote:
> > >
> > > >  I thought some pretty strong objections were raised to text
> decoration.
> > > > Why are you actively developing it?
> > > >
> > >
> > > There were some concerns cited, as well as some unresolved debate
> about the
> > > exact shape of the API, but my read is that the objections aren't
> > > sufficiently fundamental to block prototyping (such that we might gain
> some
> > > implementation experience to inform the API's development).
> > >
> > >
> > The strong objections were more general opposition to the use of text in
> 2D
> > canvas because of its various shortcomings (accessibility, crawling, etc)
> > IMHO, that is a completely different debate than the question of whether
> or
> > not the canvas text should have more bells and whistles.
>
> That seems highly related. Adding more features to functionality that is
> bad for users seems to encourage authors to create pages that are bad for
> users. Also, it seems strange to spend time implementing new features while
> actively discouraging people from using them.
>
> / Jonas
>
Even though text in canvases is generally discouraged, there are still
valid cases where it is a desirable feature.  For better or worse, canvas
text is already out there and being used in many places; in games and
interactive apps in particular. The way to move forward from here is to fix
the problems we are currently facing with canvas text rather than stopping
to improve text in hopes that people will abandon it so that we'll someday
be able to deprecate it.

Making canvas text friendlier to the web is possible, but I'll admit we
have a long way to go. A big step in that direction is the canvas HitRegion
feature, which we intend to implement in Blink. It will be possible to use
HitRegions to make canvas text scrape-able (i.e. screen reader friendly,
searchable, etc.).

    -Justin