Re: another example of HTMl 5 canvas with interactive UI elements.

On 7/10/09 2:03 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Robin Berjon<robin@berjon.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On Jul 10, 2009, at 09:14 , Joshue O Connor wrote:
>>      
>>> Yes, the WG could strongly advocate the use of<canvas>  for nothing
>>> other than eye candy or pretty pictures. In fact the spec already pretty
>>> much states that it shouldn't be used when there is a better solution -
>>> not that many will listen as the genie is already out.
>>>        
>> That's not a solution. People advocated for years that images shouldn't be
>> used for textual content and that changed exactly nothing. The only thing
>> that could make textual images go was always going to be support for
>> arbitrary fonts, because it then becomes easier to do it and to maintain
>> than if you have to pull up Photoshop.
>>      
>
> Indeed, this is the sort of solution I would strongly advocate.
>
> While I do think we should come up with an official way to make
> <canvas>  accessible, it will by nature be a bolt-on accessibility
> solution. And I think everyone agrees that these are all too often
> simply not used by authors. What we can do is advocate authors of JS
> libraries that make use of<canvas>  and ask them to make the library
> make use of the bolt-on mechanism, that way we would probably be able
> to affect a larger number of sites.
>
> But ultimately I think a better strategy is to look at *why* people
> use<canvas>  and give them to features that they need in order not to
> use it. @font-face will hopefully be able to get rid of a lot of
> in-accessible textual images (as long as the font foundries agree to
> simple enough licensing terms). I think other CSS/CSS-like features
> could help a lot with other places where<canvas>  was used.
>    

I very much agree that we need to try to solve this on exactly these two 
fronts. I agree the first is bolt-on, extra work, but is something we 
need an immediate answer for, while the latter involves outreach and the 
long term improvement of making the 'right way' easier in terms of 
meeting whatever need canvas is filling.

cheers,
David
> For example wouldn't it have been great if SVG or something like it
> had been able to turn a<table>  into the graph on
> http://www.whatwg.org/issues/data.html, or the display on
> http://tools.mozilla.com/ (which really is just a glorified table).
>
> To paraphrase a well known quote: I want<canvas>  to be legal,
> accessible and rare ;)
>
> / Jonas
>
>