Canvas

Dave Hyatt has been writing about the features which have been added to WebKit to support the Dashboard in Tiger, and today he writes about a spookily familiar new feature -- the canvas.

I say it is spooky because a few weeks ago, I had the great idea to expose the Flash MX drawing API to Python on the server side using Nevow. It really was a great idea, too. In less than a week, I had a working implementation and a nice demo application, which I wrote about here.

The original idea was not to specifically have Flash glue, but to devise a server side api for drawing which would use whatever client side drawing technology was available. I originally thought of SVG as the non-flash example, but the WebKit canvas would be excellent glue to write a Nevow canvas implementation with. It would provide some things that Flash currently does not (if only on Safari), such as better integration with actual HTML.