On the new <canvas> HTML5 tag by Stefano Mazzocchi

Hello,

   Stefano Mazzocchi (of Apache Cocoon fame) writes in the blog story titled "On the new 
<canvas> HTML tag":

  Mozilla turned on the new <canvas> HTML tag, so I expect Firefox 1.1 to have it.
<canvas> is a was first introduced by Apple in Safari for their implementation of the 
upcoming 'DashBoard' in MacOX 10.4 (aka Tiger) and now it's part of new, non-W3C effort 
to improve HTML for richer client-side web applications. It introduces the notion of an 
"image you can paint on" programmatically. People have been doing this with applets, then 
shockwave, then flash, then svg, now this. The trend is clear: smaller, leaner, faster to 
startup, more integrated in your environment (means real event interoperation with the 
page!), easier for DHTML designers to understand.

This leads me to think that <canvas> is going to be huge. By the time the new Adobe
+Macromedia colossus decide the faith of flash+SVG, this little HTML tag will slowly make 
both suboptimal for many simple tasks they are used for today.

Also, <canvas> has the potential to become the new <iframe> for advertisers, making it 
harder for things like adblock to recognize adds and remove them (or maybe adblock will 
just need to be a little smarter and use DOM3 xpaths instead).

The other interesting thing is that <canvas> is somewhat proprietary and only Mozilla, 
Firefox and Safari implement it (maybe Opera does too but I'm not sure). Some people 
complained about this not 'being standard' (as in "W3C recommendation" standard) and 
this was the reply from one of the developers:

We are turning canvas on -- it's already on by now. Get over it. Nothing in a relatively new 
spec is set in concrete, but that does not prevent useful work from being built on it. This 
is how the Internet protocols, and then the web, were built. Welcome back to incremental