How To Get Around the Holes In IE9 Beta's Implementation of Canvas

mudimba writes "Microsoft has made grand announcements about how great their implementation of the HTML5 canvas specification is. However, while I was porting a large HTML5 application to work with IE9 beta I found that there are some key features missing. Workarounds are provided where possible. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the submitted article.)"

Re:Not sure why this is here

[Bert64]

Do Apple systems not qualify as *nix anymore?

Re:IE8 is NOT the most pleasant/compatible/fast

[Jezral]

- since IE is the only browser to enforce XHR caching, every request needs a timestamp query parameter (something that no other browser does, and which is really stupid, altough easy to provide)

Or, you could use POST requests like you're supposed to. Any number of intermediary caches and load balancing tricks can play foul with GET requests, but POST is not allowed to be cached.

With jQuery this is as simple as using $.post() instead of $.get().

Re:Gotta say it

[bunratty]

All browsers are non-compliant, in the sense that no browser supports all published web standards 100% accurately. The fail score in IE9 certainly is meaningful -- IE9 does not support SVG fonts or SMIL animation. Again, if you know what the Acid test is testing, you can interpret the results of the test accurately. IE9 scoring 95/100 is great news for web developers -- they can use the JavaScript and DOM features that will become more important as browsers support complicated user interfaces in HTML. Or, that is, they can when IE9 becomes popular. The next step is for browsers to support HTML5 well.

Re:Gotta say it

[I8TheWorm]

You get that it's beta, right?

Microsoft Responds

[TimSneath]

Hi there, thank you for the post. I just wanted to add a few observations on behalf of the Internet Explorer team.

Firstly, no browser offers a perfect implementation of the Canvas 2D API specification to date - we've documented and shared a few examples from our test suites here: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/#html5Canvas [microsoft.com]

As has been well noted, the IE9 build tested was our beta.

Secondly, in response to the specific issues raised, Giorgio Sardo has posted a response on his blog here:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/b/giorgio/archive/2011/01/14/building-great-browsers-together.aspx [msdn.com]

We'll update this entry over time.

Thanks for listening,

Tim Sneath | Microsoft Corp.