[whatwg] Bicubic filtering on context.drawImage

[Rik Cabanier]

Hi Katelyn,

would this solved by creating a list of resampling methods that are clearly
defined in the spec?
Do you have a list in mind?


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:14 AM, K. Gadd <kg at luminance.org> wrote:

> In game scenarios it is sometimes necessary to have explicit control
> over the filtering mechanism used, too. My HTML5 ports of old games
> all have severe rendering issues in every modern browser because of
> changes they made to canvas semantics - using filtering when not
> requested by the game, sampling outside of texture rectangles as a
> result of filtering


Can you give an example of when that sampling happens?


> , etc - imageSmoothingEnabled doesn't go far enough
> here, and I am sure there are applications that would break if
> bilinear was suddenly replaced with bicubic, or bicubic was replaced
> with lanczos, or whatever. This matters since some applications may be
> using getImageData to sample the result of a scaled drawImage and
> changing the scaling algorithm can change the data they get.
>
> One example I can think of is that many games bilinear scale a tiny
> (2-16 pixel wide) image to get a large, detailed gradient (since
> bilinear cleanly interpolates the endpoints). If you swap to another
> algorithm the gradient may end up no longer being linear, and the
> results would change dramatically.
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Simon Sarris <sarris at acm.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 2:40 PM, Justin Novosad <junov at google.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Yes, and if we fixed it to make it prettier, people would complain
> about a
> >> performance regression. It is impossible to make everyone happy right
> now.
> >> Would be nice to have some kind of speed versus quality hint.
> >
> >
> > As a canvas/web author (not vendor) I agree with Justin. Quality is very
> > important for some canvas apps (image viewers/editors), performance is
> very
> > important for others (games).
> >
> > Canvas fills a lot of roles, and leaving a decision like that up to
> > browsers where they are forced to pick one or the other in a utility
> > dichotomy. I don't think it's a good thing to leave "debatable" choices
> up
> > to browser vendors. It ought to be something solved at the spec level.
> >
> > Either that or end users/programmers need to get really lucky and hope
> all
> > the browsers pick a similar method, because the alternative is a
> > (admittedly soft) version of "This site/webapp best viewed in Netscape
> > Navigator".
> >
> > Simon Sarris
>