Tech News: Mozilla Drags IE Into The Future With Canvas Element Plugin
Most browser implementors are quick to adopt emerging Internet technologies, but Microsoft can’t or won’t make Internet Explorer a modern web browser. Despite some positive steps in the right direction, Internet Explorer still lacks many important features. Its mediocrity has arguably hampered the evolution of the web and forced many site designers to depend on suboptimal proprietary solutions. 1
Modern web services are rapidly carving a space alongside conventional desktop applications, but the underlying technologies that power the web haven’t always evolved fast enough to keep up. This disparity has burdened web application developers with limitations that stifle innovation and prevent the Internet from achieving its full potential. Pushing the web forward is a difficult challenge because the need for interoperability implies a need for broad consensus among the major stakeholders. The OpenAjax Alliance could build some much-needed forward momentum around standardization efforts by helping web developers articulate their collective requirements. 2
The Canvas element allows web developers to programmatically render interactive bitmap images in HTML content. It was invented by Apple to bring richer graphical capabilities to the company’s WebKit renderer. The Canvas functionality eventually became part of the HTML5 standard and has been implemented in both Gecko and Presto. Canvas is used extensively in several popular web applications, including Google Maps, but it hasn’t gained widespread acceptance because it isn’t available in Internet Explorer. 3
In order to make Google Maps work in IE, Google had to develop ExCanvas—a complex library that implements many of the Canvas element’s features with VML, Microsoft’s proprietary alternative to SVG. Unfortunately, scripted manipulation of VML is too slow to be used for highly interactive web applications. Mozilla’s solution is to bake its own native Canvas implementation into an ActiveX plugin that can be integrated directly into Internet Explorer. 4
His Internet Explorer component is built with Firefox code and implements much of the HTML5 Canvas specification. There are still some missing pieces, however, including support for several drawing functions. It’s still largely a work in progress, and development is still at a somewhat early stage. 5
