Re: hit testing and retained graphics

On Thu, 30 Jun 2011 03:16:18 +0200, Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au>
wrote:

> Matt May:
>> Flash uses retained-mode graphics.
>
> If Flash doesn’t support immediate mode graphics, then I’m not sure how
> it would be that the “Bespin/Skywriter canvas-as-UI problem … would have
> been reasonably well supported by the accessibility support found in
> Flash Player 8”.  Would you not have had to rewrite Bespin with Flash’s
> retained mode graphics API (and thus avoiding this whole problem in the
> first place)?  Isn’t this the same as people saying “rewrite your app in
> SVG”?

No, because if you *can't* write with immediate mode, you won't. If you
*can* - as you can on the open web, using canvas, we can be reasonably
sure that *someone* (and most likely, following that a whole lot more
someones doing ever crazier things, and sometimes actually seriously) will
do so. As was the case for Skywriter/Bespin. As was the case for certain
products we have worked on at Opera.

"Rewrite your app in SVG" is probably, in most cases, quite a lot of work.
By comparison, "add a bit of SVG-like stuff to your app" (should that be
the agreed way to improve things that for some reason or other are done in
canvas) is often going to be rather less. Which is important in achieving
accessibility.

Demanding perfection is great if you only care about accessing what is
perfect, but history bears out the fact that people want the stuff that is
actually pretty badly put together, with minimal attention to
construction, but which is actually interesting content. Simplifying the
path for a developer to get it "right", and making it possible to get
incremental benefits, is better than instituting an all-or-nothing
approach which many people would predict will lead to a very large dose of
nothing in places where we could have had "not perfect, but better than
nothing".

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
       je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Friday, 1 July 2011 14:42:23 UTC