Re:Here's why Raphael.js and SVG totally rock.
by chairface on Friday April 23, 2010 @10:58AM
(#1288215)
There's already an implementation of hardware accelerated SVG, in IE9: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/07/a-closer-look-at...
There's also a toggle in Firefox's about:config that turns on hardware acceleration on Windows.
Re:Here's why Raphael.js and SVG totally rock.
by nimrody on Friday April 23, 2010 @03:21AM
(#1287517)
What about printing? Does canvas maintain resolution independence like SVG? ... I.e., can you print your beautifully drawn graphs and expect to get quality output?
Re:Here's why Raphael.js and SVG totally rock.
by arethuza on Thursday April 22, 2010 @05:15PM
(#1286482)
What makes you say that? SVG is pretty much standard drawing primitives wrapped in a XML-based syntax.
Re:Here's why Raphael.js and SVG totally rock.
by steadicat on Thursday April 22, 2010 @05:40PM
(#1286552)
Not exactly. SVG syntax describes a scene, it does not draw on screen directly.
When you animate an SVG image, you update the DOM. The browser then needs to parse the DOM (attributes) again, then clear the screen and draw each element again. This is a lot more work than just mapping the drawing primitives of Canvas to the lower-level GPU functions.
Check this presentation for the two technologies compared in terms of how much work is required for animation: http://www.slideshare.net/madrobby/i-cant-believe-its-not-fl...
It is also more likely to get faster in the future, as browsers might implement GPU acceleration for it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for GPU acceleration for SVG, since SVG is not as easily mapped to drawing primitives, like Canvas is.