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Comment by kiernanmcgowan | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful all canvas rendering <3

It's really a joy to see the art and the weirdness that can be done with modern web technologies. Doubly reassuring that this is done with open technologies which can enable unique expression in the modern age.

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I used to do weird web art back on Netscape 3 (1996). Honestly it's more surprising that browser art/music is so rarely done.

I think part of it is that the environment is inherently a state of distracted and constant navigating. The state of stillness and absorption you need for art/music is counter to the browsing state of mind.

Rendering the whole page on a canvas is the opposite of “open”, but whatever floats your boat. We’re going back to 2005 when it was fashionable to make your site be an single opaque SWF. Time is a flat circle.

You don't see a difference in openness between a proprietary programming environment and an open source language using an open standard drawing API?

Are you maybe saying canvasses are a step back for accessibility? Because I do see that problem (though hopefully it will be addressed).

There’s open as in “can make” and there’s open as in “can repurpose”. I believe the parent is talking about the latter. The great thing about HTML is that it is machine readable by default, and that allows for permissionless innovation like search engines. You wouldn’t get Google in a world where everything was rendered to a bitmap, standards-based drawing API or not.

That's shifting the goal posts quite significantly. HTML is machine-readable because it's less powerful than a drawing API. There's a lot of applications that can't be created with plain HTML.

html isnt a programming language though is it

apples and pairs

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