[webkit-dev] New web-facing canvas feature: "opaque" attribute

[Dean Jackson]

On 15/03/2013, at 8:06 AM, Gregg Tavares <gman at google.com> wrote:

> Because it's not the same as fillRect(0, 0, width, height) on an empty canvas. The canvas itself has alpha (unless we add the option to not have it as has been proposed). The contents of the canvas has to stay as the user created it. If I draw with rgba(255,255,0, 0.5) I expect if I read data out of the canvas or draw that canvas into another canvas I'll get that color, not the color blended with the css background.

Yes, this is what I said in another email. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but if the main concern is to guarantee nice subpixel-antialiased text in canvas (but not anywhere else, such as the 99.99% of places where people draw text) then.... well, I'm still not convinced opaque is a great idea :) Especially not as an HTML attribute.

There are obviously ways to get around the problems you mentioned above (e.g. two buffers + two draws, or keeping a display list until someone wants to read out, etc) and, even more obviously, they have significant problems. It just seems to me that we're trying to address the issue of wanting nice looking text with a very specific solution on one element. Maybe we should consider what we could do across the platform?

Dean


> So, the canvas has to be blended if there's alpha. There's no magic getting around that. The only way around it is to give the user a way to say "no alpha".