Maintainer here. dang suggested I add a comment to the thread to help start possible conversations about the project. So I'll answer 3 self-asked questions.
"Why did you start the project?"
Short answer: I'd spent 3 years trying to get my first job in tech (London). A recruiter took pity on me in 2013 and suggested I build up a portfolio of projects on GitHub to showcase my abilities. I started a project which included an animation on canvas, and took the decision to code the animation using the canvas API rather than an existing library. I got a bit obsessive about the canvas element over the next few years. 7 years later, I'm finally beginning to feel happy and confident in the work.
"What problems does the project solve?"
My view is that there's three big issues with the <canvas> element: accessibility; responsiveness; fun.
Accessibility - because the current canvas element completely fails users who access websites with non-visual browsers and devices. All information contained in the graphic output is a black box to them. This has to change.
Responsiveness - because the current canvas element doesn't know how to play nicely with CSS responsive design patterns.
Fun - because trying to do anything reasonably complex with the Canvas API is not fun.
"What are your hopes for the project?"
I'm not looking for the library to take the frontend world by storm (though it is a nice fantasy).
What would really make me happy would be if maintainers of other canvas libraries look at what I've tried to do with Scrawl-canvas around the areas of accessibility and responsiveness, and add that sort of functionality to their projects - hopefully in even better, more efficient ways.
Oh - and finding some collaborators to work on the project would also be good, because I've spent too long working on it by myself and it could really do with some fresh eyes and opinions.
I only have limited resources to test the library. I managed to get it working in Safari on MacOS (though not perfectly - tabbing through the links in the kitchen canvas moves the canvas out of view).
All bug reports of the site not working on various devices are very welcome!
If it is IntersectionObserver causing the problem (as reported in the other comment) - that's sad. I'm using IO on the landing page to switch off the animations when they're not in view; the last thing I want the library to do is drain people's batteries.
This fails my very first test of anything canvasy: it’s not scaling by devicePixelRatio, so it looks bad on a high-DPI display, especially if text is involved. I usually find this to be a bad sign.
This puzzled me, because it mostly looks very good (even if it rather encourages CPU-guzzling). Have you just never had access to a high-DPI environment and thus never thought about it? Anyway, this one should be very quick to fix.
Accessibility: yeah, you can tab between the links, which is good, but when you’re just hovering you’re not hovering over a real link, so you can’t see the link target, the cursor is wrong (though one that could be fixed), and modifiers don’t work. Right-click triggers the “links” too, which it shouldn’t. Things like this must be handled by drawing real DOM elements persistently on top of the canvas, and letting the user genuinely interact with them. No other approach is capable of achieving the expected and desired result. Not `location.href = …`, not `open(…)`, not `link.click()`. Nothing.
One straightforward (but inferior) approach to make this work could be to put an <a tabindex=-1> above the entire canvas (or even wrapping the canvas!) and set its href when hovering a “link”, and remove it again when not.
I haven’t delved into any more of the accessibility stuff, but it looks much better than most, and just needs to work on any real DOM counterparts to canvas pieces actually being in the right place, so that interactions, text selection, &c. can work properly.
Hi chrismorgan. Many thanks for taking the time to check over the site, and giving me feedback!
Can I ask which device/screen you used to view the site? I'm currently limited to a Macbook Pro, so can't get the insight of seeing the page on other devices.
>> This fails my very first test of anything canvasy: it’s not scaling by devicePixelRatio, so it looks bad on a high-DPI display, especially if text is involved. I usually find this to be a bad sign. [...] Anyway, this one should be very quick to fix
Noted. Fixing will take a bit of thought as it won't be a simple case of scaling (as suggested here[1]). The canvas Cell where most of the work happens can already have different dimensions to the display canvas, which goes partway to addressing the problem. The library should also play nicely with <img srcset="..." sizes="..."> - I'm only supplying a single src value for the images used on the site.
>> (even if it rather encourages CPU-guzzling)
Yes. Minimising the impact on the CPU will remain a key priority for the library going forward.
>> Accessibility: yeah, you can tab between the links, which is good, but when you’re just hovering you’re not hovering over a real link, so you can’t see the link target,
That's an issue with the page code, not the library, I think. Hovering over a link with the mouse cursor should bring up a tooltip (working on my machine for Chrome, Firefox, Edge; fails on Safari) - I didn't think to include the link url when designing the page, but that can be easily added. Tabbing (which doesn't work on Firefox because[2], and is buggy on Safari) shows the link at the bottom-left of the browser window on Chrome, Edge.
>> the cursor is wrong (though one that could be fixed),
Agreed, fixable.
>> and modifiers don’t work.
On my Macbook Pro hovering over a link (and tabbing to it) changes the size of the pin and displays a graphic text label. Is that not what you see? The library has functionality to handle focus and blur states, but I've not thought to include anything to handle visited and active states.
>> Right-click triggers the “links” too, which it shouldn’t.
I can replicate this on Firefox, when I previously agree to "allow popups". Without that user agreement, the right click shows the small menu with links to "save image" etc. Does not seem to be occurring on Chrome, Edge, Safari.
... I'm beginning to fall out-of-love with Firefox on Mac
>> Things like this must be handled by drawing real DOM elements persistently on top of the canvas, and letting the user genuinely interact with them. No other approach is capable of achieving the expected and desired result. Not `location.href = …`, not `open(…)`, not `link.click()`. Nothing. One straightforward (but inferior) approach to make this work could be to put an <a tabindex=-1> above the entire canvas (or even wrapping the canvas!) and set its href when hovering a “link”, and remove it again when not.
This can be achieved by wrapping the canvas element in a Scrawl-canvas stack, which then allows DOM elements to be positioned over (or beneath) the canvas in the same way as canvas entitys. By making the DOM element "mimic" its entity, DOM element positions and dimensions can be handled automatically.
>> I haven’t delved into any more of the accessibility stuff, but it looks much better than most, and just needs to work on any real DOM counterparts to canvas pieces actually being in the right place, so that interactions, text selection, &c. can work properly.
The main thing I’m talking about is links, that links need to be real, or the interactions are all wrong, irredeemably. It must be a real <a href> element that the user hovers over and clicks on, or else the link destination isn’t shown in status text (and you can’t just set window.status like you used to be able to!), and modifiers don’t work.
Modifiers: Ctrl+click, Shift+click, Ctrl+Shift+click, that sort of thing, which change where the link will open—current window, new window, new background tab, new foreground tab, it’s up to the user agent to decide what it all means, and target=_blank is the only slight control authors can have. If you use open(…) or similar, it will do the wrong thing.
open() is a very flimsy tool that has (or should have) very limited use. Browsers are likely to block it, though they may allow it to operate as part of an event handler.
Concerning DOM elements matching the canvas contents, yes, that’s the approach that needs to be taken; and it needs to be taken. This leads me to suspect that for many applications minimising the part that happens in the canvas, or making an SVG/canvas hybrid, may be more sensible.
The few examples I looked at seemed to start in the direction of doing this, but not take it as far as it needs to be taken to satisfy accessibility.
>> It must be a real <a href> element that the user hovers over and clicks on
For each <canvas> element that Scrawl-canvas wraps, it adds a hidden <nav> element to the DOM, immediately after that <canvas> element. Creating a graphical entity with an anchor attribute will trigger the library to add an <a> element to the hidden <nav> element. When the user clicks on the graphical entity in the canvas, the library creates a new MouseEvent 'click' event and then dispatches it from the <a> element.
The anchors are not directly placed over the graphical entitys in the canvas, but they are there in the DOM.
>> Modifiers: Ctrl+click, Shift+click, Ctrl+Shift+click, that sort of thing, which change where the link will open—current window, new window, new background tab, new foreground tab, it’s up to the user agent to decide what it all means, and target=_blank is the only slight control authors can have.
For Chrome running on a Macbook Pro: Shift+click opens the link in a new window; Command+click opens the link in a new tab but remains on the original page. I've not tested this functionality yet for other browsers, or for any browser running in a different OS/device.
>> If you use open(…) or similar, it will do the wrong thing. open() is a very flimsy tool that has (or should have) very limited use. Browsers are likely to block it, though they may allow it to operate as part of an event handler.
The library makes no use of window.open(), or similar. Links are driven by MouseEvents:
let e = new MouseEvent('click', {
view: window,
bubbles: true,
cancelable: true
});
>> Concerning DOM elements matching the canvas contents, yes, that’s the approach that needs to be taken; and it needs to be taken. This leads me to suspect that for many applications minimising the part that happens in the canvas, or making an SVG/canvas hybrid, may be more sensible. The few examples I looked at seemed to start in the direction of doing this, but not take it as far as it needs to be taken to satisfy accessibility.
I am grateful for the feedback! If the responses I've given above indicate that my thinking is flawed, then it is much better for this flawed thinking to be exposed and examined - and, if possible, fixed in the near future - rather than letting them lie hidden and festering in the library, making it unusable for serious production sites.
Interesting. I had forgotten that synthesising events and dispatching them triggered the appropriate functionality. I knew it once, but for some reason I’d ended up thinking that .click() was special.
Anyway, it’s not enough to simulate clicking on the anchor element, for two reasons:
• As hitherto stated, the anchor element is not there under the mouse; so any other interactions definitely won’t work properly. e.g. hover should show the link destination in the status bar, and right click should open a context menu with items like “open link”, “open link in new tab”, “open link in private window”, “send link”, &c. I don’t believe that either of these can be triggered programmatically.
• It doesn’t have the desired effect across all browsers. In fact, I find it surprising that a synthesised click event would have modifiers work in any browser, and I’m inlined to call it a bug. The synthesised event doesn’t have the modifiers like ctrlKey set on it, so if Chrome is trying to be helpful by guessing that you probably want the modifiers to apply even to the faked event (which is a dubious assumption) then it puts it at odds with event handlers, which will see events without ctrlKey et al. And if you try to set ctrlKey in Firefox (haven’t tried in any other browser) then it ignores the event (which I find a tad surprising, but I’m guessing it’s a form of browser hijack protection), so there doesn’t seem to be any way to make this simulation approach work in Firefox.
There’s a lot you can do in browsers, but there’s also rather a lot of user agent functionality that can’t be faked, like <a href> and scrolling. And so for those sorts of things, I say: use the native functionality, and accept no substitutes.
I am heartened to see how carefully you’ve been thinking all these things through. Nice job!
Cool project. I used a somewhat similar project fabric.js to build an interface to display OCR boxes on scanned documents and label them them for document understanding. The essential feature was to display polygons on top of the document image, which were editable by hand (resize, translate, zoom, rotate).
"Why did you start the project?"
Short answer: I'd spent 3 years trying to get my first job in tech (London). A recruiter took pity on me in 2013 and suggested I build up a portfolio of projects on GitHub to showcase my abilities. I started a project which included an animation on canvas, and took the decision to code the animation using the canvas API rather than an existing library. I got a bit obsessive about the canvas element over the next few years. 7 years later, I'm finally beginning to feel happy and confident in the work.
"What problems does the project solve?"
My view is that there's three big issues with the <canvas> element: accessibility; responsiveness; fun.
Accessibility - because the current canvas element completely fails users who access websites with non-visual browsers and devices. All information contained in the graphic output is a black box to them. This has to change.
Responsiveness - because the current canvas element doesn't know how to play nicely with CSS responsive design patterns.
Fun - because trying to do anything reasonably complex with the Canvas API is not fun.
"What are your hopes for the project?"
I'm not looking for the library to take the frontend world by storm (though it is a nice fantasy).
What would really make me happy would be if maintainers of other canvas libraries look at what I've tried to do with Scrawl-canvas around the areas of accessibility and responsiveness, and add that sort of functionality to their projects - hopefully in even better, more efficient ways.
Oh - and finding some collaborators to work on the project would also be good, because I've spent too long working on it by myself and it could really do with some fresh eyes and opinions.