That's exactly what i would be afraid of people doing. If I have a
fast system why should i have to experience low quality rendering? It
should be the job of the platform to determine what level of
performance or quality can be achieved on a given device. Typically
such a property would be considered a "hint", and as such would likely
be ignored.
If honouring this property was _required_ rather than being a hint you
would hit the following problems:
* Low power devices would have a significant potential for poor
performance if a developer found that their desktop performed well so
set the requirement to high quality.
* High power devices would be forced to use low quality rendering
modes when perfectly capable of providing better quality without
significant performance penalty.
Neither of these apply if the property were just a hint, but now you
have to think about what happens to content that uses this property in
18 months time. You've told the UA to use a low quality rendering
when it may no longer be necessary, so now the UA has a choice it
either always obeys the property meaning lower quality than is
necessary so that new content performs well, or it ignores the
property in which case new content performs badly.
The correct behaviour would be for the UA to work out itself what it
can do, which it needs to be able to do anyway, in order to satisfy
the "auto" option.
--Oliver
On Jun 2, 2008, at 2:15 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
Sure; bilinear filtering is slower than nearest neighbour sampling,
and in many cases the app author would like to be able to decide
that tradeoff (or, at least, to be able to say "I want this to go as
fast as possible, regardless of quality"). Some apps might also
render to a canvas just once, and would prefer to do it at the
highest quality filtering available even if it's more expensive than
the default.
- Vlad
On Jun 2, 2008, at 12:25 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
Um, could you actually give some kind of reasoning for these? I am
not aware of any significant performance issues in Canvas that
cannot be almost directly attributed to JavaScript itself rather
than the canvas.
--Oliver
On Jun 2, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
I'd like to propose adding an imageRenderingQuality property on
the canvas 2D context to allow authors to choose speed vs. quality
when rendering images (especially transformed ones). This is
modeled on the SVG image-rendering property, at http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/painting.html#ImageRenderingProperty
:
attribute string imageRenderingQuality;
'auto' (default): The user agent shall make appropriate tradeoffs
to balance speed and quality, but quality shall be given more
importance than speed.
'optimizeQuality': Emphasize quality over rendering speed.
'optimizeSpeed': Emphasize speed over rendering quality.
No specific image sampling algorithm is specified for any of these
properties, with the exception that, at a minimum, nearest-
neighbour resampling should be used. One alternative is to
specify 'best', 'good', 'fast', with "good" being the default, as
opposed to the SVG names; I think those names are more
descriptive, but there might be value in keeping the names
consistent with SVG, especially if that property bubbles up into
general CSS usage.
- Vlad
