- Drawing in a Page
- Understanding the Canvas
- Drawing a Bzier Curve
- Browser Support
Browser Support
The <canvas> tag was initially introduced by Apple into WebKit for use in Dashboard widgets, rather than for web use. Since then, Opera and Firefox have also gained implementations. Internet Explorer 9 is expected to implement it, but IE 8 and earlier don't.
One of the aims of the HTML 5 standard is that third parties should be able to implement HTML 5 on legacy browsers. Internet Explorer doesn't provide its own canvas element, but it does provide vector-drawing functions in the form of Microsoft's Vector Markup Language (VML). The Explorer Canvas script uses this capability to implement canvas support on top of the native VML support.
You can deploy canvas support now, without having to wait for Microsoft to get around to implementing it. But remember to provide some fallback code for people who browse without JavaScript enabled, or with a browser that doesn't yet support it.