Raphaël, small javascript library for manipulating images and charts (svg/vml)

dmitry.baranovskiy.com

13 points·toni··6 comments

I started playing with this yesterday. It might make for a good alternative to canvas. At least from a compatibility standpoint.

Internet Explorer doesn't have native support for canvas or svg, which is why Excanvas and Raphael fall back on vml to provide canvas and svg-like support, respectively.

Canvas and vml really aren't a good match, though. Canvas is stateless, whereas both vml and svg insert objects into the DOM. It's this mismatch that really kills Excanvas' performance when rendering any kind of animation.

"... Internet Explorer doesn't have native support for canvas ..."

Yes it does ~ http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/

Explorer Canvas aka "Excanvas" uses VML. That's kind of what my post was about. It's a very nice hack, but it's certainly not native support.

"... It's a very nice hack, but it's certainly not native support. ..."

You are right. I missed that bit but does allow you to give IE users a taste. If we waited for full binary support for all things without hacks nothing would get done.

This is pretty cool.

I'm impressed that they have tested it in working in IE6+, FF3+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5

I can think of a few apps that could use this library. Man it's really difficult to express enthusiasm over the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com