I’ve been reading through HTML5: The Missing Manual, Second Edition in order to get my HTML up to date (I am very familiar with 4.01 but haven’t done anything that needed the newer stuff till now). Having reached the section on canvas and being interested in pictures and games related stuff, I was interested to find that the API looks pretty much one to one a mirror of the postscript level 2 rendering engine (without the forth heritage and stack machine framing). This goes right down to the endcap styles on lines and join types for figures.

I’m guessing that they found a model that worked and that people were familiar with and stuck to it.

I’ll have to continue my reading for a bit before I’m ready to try coding to this stuff (and I’ have quite a bit of detail work I want to finish on this site before then as well). Looks interesting and capable enough to do some things. I’m expecting to wander over to WebGL at some point (I’ve also got an OpenGL ES book coming soon) as that may present more opportunities to render attractive and functional interfaces in a browser.

After HTML5 I’ll hop over through CSS3 and the current state of JavaScript and JQuery (again things I’ve used, but some time ago and for rather specific purposes) to see where things have gotten to since last time I looked closely at them.

I’ve also got to go back into the series of arrangements needed make RESTful interfaces with PHP on apache in order to tie everything together, but one step at a time…