The continuing UA within UAs

tl;dr: Mozilla is developing a PDF viewer in JS and Canvas. Emscripten 
continues to be used to port existing code from other languages into the 
browser, targeting JS and Canvas. These are reasonable use cases for 
Canvas and for examining Canvas accessibility.

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Mozilla's continuing progress in implementing a PDF UA using Canvas is 
promising:

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/this-is-what-firefoxs-built-in-pdf-reader-looks-like-20111027/

https://github.com/andreasgal/pdf.js


It was written from scratch, in JS, for Canvas. I'll be using it for 
further discussion on A11y regions.
I hope to see a growing consensus on this project as a reasonable use 
case for Canvas.

In history:
I still believe remote desktop implementations of  VNC and RDP (there 
are now several in Canvas) are valid, as are rich text / alternative 
text editors; but many vendors have pushed-back strongly on those use 
cases.  Several examples of SVG and HTML rendering libraries have also 
been shared on this list and dismissed.


Here's a fun, unrelated, concept project: A JavaScript H.264 decoder
https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway

"The demo is Android's H.264 decoder compiled with Emscripten to 
JavaScript, then further optimized with Google's JavaScript closure 
compiler. No hardware acceleration whatsoever!"

I've repeatedly brought up the use of Emscripten to cross-compile 
existing libraries written in C, C++ and other languages, into 
JavaScript, and the usefulness of Canvas in that process. Broadway shows 
yet another example of how that process works.

I hope, at some point, that we can develop consensus around 
cross-compiling as another compelling use case.


-Charles

Received on Saturday, 29 October 2011 05:21:03 UTC