

Ask HN: I have trouble finding the right JS/Canvas solution - ElongatedTowel

I&#x27;m still a novice when it comes to JavaScript and though I did a few smaller projects in Angular and dabbled a bit in using Canvas for games I&#x27;m far from having the knowledge to find the right answer to most problems.<p>I&#x27;ve been working on a project that involves a large amount of images which need to be moved, resized and categorized. I think it&#x27;s comparable to what Microsoft has shown on the Surface. So far it&#x27;s pretty static, which means instead of dragging pictures into zones to tag them I just select them by clicking on them and then open a dialog. Pretty easy to do, pretty useless for large amounts of images. Using the DOM and a framework everything is cut out to solve this problem.<p>Problem is, it is too slow and too rigid. I wanted to add selection by drawing a box, or even a polygon with a pen. To my understanding this is both possible in Canvas and WebGL, but neither allow me to use the DOM or frameworks build on top. There are frameworks which make the Canvas more accessible, but they are all targeted at making games and basically no interaction which is made easy with DOM + JS is implemented.<p>Is this a gap in the world of JS no one has yet filled? The only remotely active framework that promises more than just game development is KineticJS. I havent found any project using it and flagship projects like Mozilla&#x27;s Bespin were all abandoned in favor of projects like Cloud 9 or Ace which use the DOM.<p>I feel like I would be stuck rolling out my own solution to this problem, which is far out of my reach.
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onion2k
three.js is very quick, and works well with CSS3D for DOM stuff. Example:
[http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict...](http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodictable/)
<\- Each periodic table element is a group of divs in the HTML.

