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

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Dean Jackson <dino at apple.com> wrote:

> On 15/03/2013, at 12:49 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir at mozilla.com>
> wrote:
> > On 3/14/2013 5:23 PM, Dean Jackson wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > The main concern for us was performance -- if you have a large canvas,
> whether on mobile or on desktop, it is beneficial to tell the browser that
> it is guaranteed opaque, and it can allocate backing store and draw it as
> such.  There's no way to infer that... checking the CSS background doesn't
> work for the reasons Gregg outlined.  Basing it on a fillRect() of the
> entire canvas with a non-opaque color doesn't work, because there are blend
> modes that will punch holes in alpha.  So you can have a really complicated
> heuristic to try to get it right and miss in a bunch of cases, or you can
> just "make it work" in the general case (have alpha), and let developers
> who are trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the platform
> give you the hints you need.  We opted for the latter approach.
>
> Fair enough. I'm not arguing against the benefits - as I said, we get the
> request all the time. I'm just hoping there is a way we can do this for
> more elements than just canvas.
>
> If we do decide this is canvas only, I don't like an attribute on the
> element. That seems too presentational. It's the script that decides what
> is drawn into canvas, so the script should probably decide whether or not
> to tell the implementation it might be able to optimise by not allocating
> an alpha channel. So count me in the camp that agrees with context
> attributes.
>
> Just calling it "alpha" is also a bit confusing, because alpha will still
> work within the canvas itself.
>

How about canvas.makeOpaque() ?

- R. Niwa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20130314/0fec40e5/attachment.html>