

Microsoft "web technical evangelist" comments about Canvas support in IE9 - bensummers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/05/microsoft_ie9_and_canvasn/

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rbranson
It's an amazing world we live in where a company as huge as Microsoft is
complaining that adding the <canvas> tag is too hard.

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briansmith
It is probably too large for them to be able to determine if it can be
efficiently implemented in DirectX with hardware acceleration. In order to
know that, they pretty much have to implement the whole thing and see. And, if
they find things that are poor performing (i.e. its primitives do not line up
with DirectX's primitives), they're going to push for changes to the spec to
make it efficiently implementable. But, those change proposals are likely to
fought by the other browser makers.

Also, I believe Adobe is likely to ask for changes to the <canvas>
specification too.

Plus, <canvas> is not that important if you have a high performance SVG
implementation.

Finally, <canvas> creates a situation where animated advertising cannot be
easily distinguished from other content and cannot be separately blocked from
other, useful, Javascript on the page.

So, I think there's more uncertainty regarding the <canvas> specification than
people might expect. It makes perfect sense for everything to become more
clear before committing to support it, considering Microsoft's very generous
support and backwards-compatibility guarantees to its customers.

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codexon
_Finally, <canvas> creates a situation where animated advertising cannot be
easily distinguished from other content_

That sounds like an incentive for Microsoft to implement it.

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robryan
Why wouldn't they support this? With their share of the browser market
constantly decreasing do they really want a large amount of websites taking
advantage of the canvas in the future throwing up a not compatible with IE and
links to download another browser?

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thenbrent
IE6 is proof that many will painstakingly support IE instead of just throwing
up a "not compatible" message and link to a different browser. Well, not until
5 or 6 years after the release date anyway. So why _would_ they support new
standards? :(

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nkassis
Glad to be part of a group which made the decision that having people install
a browser that supports canvas is not a too excessive requirement. For years
people have force users to use IE6 (and still do). It's time we force them to
install a browser with the features we need.

Idealistic but if you can do it, go for it.

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acg
There may be a legal reason for this, doesn't Apple hold patents on the canvas
tag? It's likely to be royalty free in HTML5 though.

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studer
Scare quotes? How "mature".

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ZeroGravitas
Would you refer to someone as a Christian Evangelist if they said "Have you
read the bible? That's a big book. And there's some crazy stuff in there. I
mean we'll think about following it, but we'd rather just follow half of it
really to the letter"?

Given how much effort he puts into dissing web standards the scare quotes seem
appropriate.

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studer
You're taking selective quoting by a tabloid as proof of anything? Or do you
only do that when it supports your preconceived notions?

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ZeroGravitas
I have read primary sources on various Microsoft blogs saying almost exactly
the same thing about a variety of standards (web and otherwise) over a period
of years. I have no reason to doubt The Register reporting in this case. This
is not in the same league as a tabloid claiming that Elvis and Bigfoot had a
lovechild. It is expected that Microsoft will trash-talk standards even, or
especially, as they are forced to implement them by market forces.

