Hi Greg, thanks for your comments. > FYI - last I checked, Microsoft had not committed to this standard, though > that may have changed. Yes, don't have any news too ... there are some browser plugin to support this in IE but of course is a different story than having it supported natively.
For sure (Microsoft or not) all the Video Games market will have a great role to push WebGL, so let's see ... and in any case there will always be the need to build user interfaces, even in that case. >> It's not clear to me if HTML5 Canvas should be enough > > IMO, the biggest limitation with canvas is it's lack of font metric info. > Otherwise, it's pretty capable for 2D graphics. I have read some article and doesn't seem it's a good option for scalable user interfaces, but haven't tried so I can't say so much ... and having "only" a better graphics (and effects, animations, etc) than usual HTML5 components doesn't give me the impression that worth the case to support it (because using many modern Javascript libraries and CSS3 probably we are near to the same final result in some cases), but it's just an impression. And our target are not Games :-) . > Also, I believe that in IE, canvas support is implemented using Direct2D, > which is a hardware-accelerated 2D drawing API. I think canvas drawing is > also accelerated on the Mac, but I'm not 100% sure. IE 10 should heve a great (hardware-accelerated) Canvas, but should be available only on newest platforms (Windows 8, and maybe Windows 7, both even on Mobile phones, and probably not other previous). But using all modern GPU benefits are real time effects, shaders, etc, and 2D is a particular case in a 3D world. I have seen that there are already some Javascript library that wraps Canvas (2D) and WebGL (3D), and this could be a good option, but of course try to support both it's an hard way. Note that WebGL output is rendered inside canvas elements. A small tutorial here: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Tutorial For Pivot 2.1 we already have some plan to try to isolate (and standardize) Java AWT / Java2D usage, and provide the current implementation (in a dedicated module) an implementation as default provider. Maybe we could try to look at what other parts of Pivot could be generalized (like BXML processing, etc) ... If someone has some idea/experiment it's welcome, even only for discussion ... we have a lot of time for thinking on features like these before a real usage I think. Bye, Sandro
