Slashdot Mirror
How To Get Around the Holes In IE9 Beta's Implementation of Canvas
mudimba writes "Microsoft has made grand announcements about how great their implementation of the HTML5 canvas specification is. However, while I was porting a large HTML5 application to work with IE9 beta I found that there are some key features missing. Workarounds are provided where possible. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the submitted article.)"
So, a browser in beta phase does not conform to a specification in draft stage!
Who would have thought!
1. He's using IE9 Beta 1, which is fairly old and out of date. He should try the latest platform preview.
2. He should post functional test cases, like ACID does, instead of posting just the code and pictures.
3. He should contact MS. Instead he is relying on the nerd-rage from Slashdot to get big enough for them to notice. They have an appropriate channel for this where the issue can be discussed.
4. Despite what people think, canvas is not HTML. It's a proprietary and patented Apple technology that has been submitted to W3C for review as a potential addition to HTML. Yes, submission to W3C does require patent disclosure and royalty-free licensing when a submission becomes a part of a recommendation, but canvas has not reached that stage. Patent fears aside, as an early draft it is a standard subject to change either by W3C or by anyone who feels like interpreting the draft as they see fit, which could occur concurrently as in opposition to each other.
Do Apple systems not qualify as *nix anymore?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yes I find it quite amusing how Microsoft plays the we are html5 ready game currently marketingwise while they literally are three years behind the competition in many areas of html5. IE9 will be html5s IE6 all over again, as it seems to me.
I just got forced to adopt IE8 compatibility (outside constraints). After developing something that runs just fine in Safari/Firefox/Chrome for 4 weeks, it took me:
The downside
- 4 hours to get it to run in IE8
- Data intensive JS processing/DOM manipulation is about 10x slower then in either of the alternatives
- Since no support for CSS3 border-image is present, it makes it look ugly
- Since DOM/JS is so slow, animations (width, height, opacity etc.) are slow as hell.
- the HTML5 popstate event (document.location change) is not supported, hence a watchdog interval has to be installed checking the document.location.hash 20x/second
- since IE is the only browser to enforce XHR caching, every request needs a timestamp query parameter (something that no other browser does, and which is really stupid, altough easy to provide)
- the developer tools are difficult to use (as compared to chrome, webkit, firebug etc.)
The Upside
- console.log works (thank god, no more alert debugging)
- The layout just worked (though I think that's rather a side effect of using pixel width/height zealously rather then an IE8 virtue)
- developer tools, any, even if they work badly, but developer tools!
Recommendation for anyone: IE is still the worst browser, and there's at least 4 alternatives which are collectively 1) faster 2) easier to develop for 3) more compatible to each other 4) prettier 5) more standards conformant
Experiments and other stuff
Hi there, thank you for the post. I just wanted to add a few observations on behalf of the Internet Explorer team.
Firstly, no browser offers a perfect implementation of the Canvas 2D API specification to date - we've documented and shared a few examples from our test suites here: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/#html5Canvas
As has been well noted, the IE9 build tested was our beta.
Secondly, in response to the specific issues raised, Giorgio Sardo has posted a response on his blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/giorgio/archive/2011/01/14/building-great-browsers-together.aspx
We'll update this entry over time.
Thanks for listening,
Tim Sneath | Microsoft Corp.