[whatwg] hit regions: clearing of regions

[Rik Cabanier]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Edward O'Connor <eoconnor at apple.com>wrote:

> Hi Rik,
>
> You wrote:
>
> > Currently, the specification states that if you create a region and
> > then create another region that completely covers region, the first
> > region is removed from the hit region list [1]
> >
> > This is a complex operation that involves either drawing the regions
> > to a bitmaps and counting pixels, or path intersection. It is also
> > unintuitive because an author might expect that he could remove the
> > second region and still have the first region active.
> >
> > What was the reason that this was added to the spec?
>
> The model the spec uses for hit regions is that you have two bitmaps--one
> for the canvas surface, and the other is used to track which hit region
> the pixels of the canvas surface are in. See this thread from 2012:
>
>
> http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-July/thread.html#36556


Thanks!
It looks like that thread never came to a conclusion.

The arguments against using a bitmap presentation still stand:
- it will be too expensive to keep an actual copy of the canvas pixels in
memory to do hit testing
- if you have to mimic the behavior with paths, you need access to
expensive/difficult path manipulation algorithms

Hit regions should be redesigned so they work on the path geometry as
opposed to pixels. We already have the necessary code to do hit testing on
paths (see isPointInPath)