[whatwg] Canvas implementors

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 5:53 AM, Michael Norton <norto at me.com> wrote:
> It seems that the canvas element could really help make this a reality.  The Editor's Draft I reviewed on the w3c site  this week seems to suggest that text and glyphs generated with accessibility-scale functions would not be able to be easily edited (text) nor cut-and-pasted.  Am I understanding this correctly?  If so, that's a plus for me as the data which would be utilized to populate the digital spectrometer on the front end would be pulled from other sources where editing functionality is authorized.

The last sentence seems unrelated to the rest of the paragraph.
Editing a data source is a very different thing from editing a local
copy of text on a webpage.  There is no reason to worry about the
latter when it's the former that needs authorization.  Using <canvas>
just to make less-accessible text is inappropriate.

Similarly, lack of copy/paste functionality is disconnected from
anything you might need authorization for at the data source level. If
you can copy/paste, you can just type it out yourself, so you aren't
preventing anything.  Efforts to restrict or disallow copy/paste on
websites in the past (stretching back to the early days of JavaScript)
have always been that terrible combination of utterly worthless and
completely user-hostile.  Using <canvas> to try and restrict
copy/paste is a fool's errand, and inappropriate as well.

That said, using <canvas> to easily create cross-platform
visualizations of data is a very worthwhile and appropriate thing to
do.

~TJ