Eloquent JavaScript, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Drawing on Canvas

“Drawing is deception.”

—M.C. Escher, cited by Bruno Ernst in The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher

Browsers give us several ways to display graphics. The simplest way is to use styles to position and color regular DOM elements. This can get you quite far, as the game in the previous chapter showed. By adding partially transparent background images to the nodes, we can make them look exactly the way we want. It is even possible to rotate or skew nodes by using the transform style.

But we’d be using the DOM for something that it wasn’t originally designed for. Some tasks, such as drawing a line between arbitrary points, are extremely awkward to do with regular HTML elements.

There are two alternatives. The first ...