Canvas element

The canvas element is part of HTML5 and allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. It is a low level, procedural model that updates a bitmap. HTML5 Canvas also helps in making 2D games. While the HTML5 canvas offers its own 2D drawing API, it also supports the WebGL API to allow 3D rendering with OpenGL ES. Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use in their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004, powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005, it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers, and Opera in 2006, and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies. A canvas consists of a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes. JavaScript code may access the area through a full set of drawing functions similar to those of other common 2D APIs, thus allowing for dynamically generated graphics. Some anticipated uses of canvas include building graphs, animations, games, and image composition. Interacting with the canvas involves obtaining the canvas' rendering context, which determines whether to use the canvas API, WebGL, or WebGL2 rendering context. The following code creates a Canvas element in an HTML page:

This text is displayed if your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

Using JavaScript, you can draw on the canvas: var example = document.getElementById('example'); var context = example.getContext('2d'); context.fillStyle = 'red'; context.fillRect(30, 30, 50, 50); This code draws a red rectangle on the screen. The Canvas API also provides save() and restore(), for saving and restoring all the canvas context's attributes. A canvas actually has two sizes: the size of the element itself and the size of the element's drawing surface. Setting the element's width and height attributes sets both of these sizes; CSS attributes affect only the element's size and not the drawing surface.