Firefox 1.5 canvas tag

September 18th, 2005

Firefox 1.5 implements the HTML canvas tag as defined in HTML 5. Canvas is quite a cool tag.

Take a look at this demo. If your using Firefox 1.5, you can “draw” on the canvas (try writing “sucks” below the Internet Explorer logo or something). As you draw, another canvas is automatically updated. The other canvas is 100×100 pixels. Take a look at the source code.

You can use this page to play around with what canvas can do. This blog entry describes using canvas to render a web page to an image.

Canvas is going to be huge. Firefox, Mozilla and Safari are already implementing it and I wouldn’t be surprised if Opera also implements it soon. It’s already been described as “revolutionary” and rich web application developers are already saying canvas is going to make their life a lot easier. Of course, it’s going to be limited in appeal until Internet Explorer supports it but it’s still cool.