Introduction to Canvas

Summary

<canvas> is an HTML element which can be used to draw graphics using scripting (usually JavaScript). It can, for instance, be used to draw graphs, make photo compositions or do simple (and not so simple) animations.

<canvas> was first introduced by Apple for the Mac OS X Dashboard and later implemented in Safari and Google Chrome. Gecko 1.8-based browsers, such as Firefox 1.5, also support this element. The <canvas> element is part of HTML5.

This tutorial describes how to implement the <canvas> element in your HTML pages. The examples provided should give you some clear ideas what you can do with <canvas> and can be used to start building your own implementations.

Before you start

Using the <canvas> element isn’t very difficult but you do need a basic understanding of HTML and JavaScript.

The <canvas> element isn’t supported in some older browsers, but is supported in Chrome 4 and later, Firefox 1.5 and later, Internet Explorer 9 and later, Opera 9 and later, and Safari 3.1 and later.

In this tutorial

• Basic usage
• Drawing shapes
• Using images
• Applying styles and colors
• Transformations
• Compositing
• Basic animations
• Optimizing the canvas

Next >>

See also

Related articles

Canvas

• canvas

• canvas

• Introduction to HTML5 games

• Achieving typographic effects with the canvas tag

• Introduction to Canvas

Attributions

• This article contains content originally from external sources, including ones licensed under the CC-BY-SA license.

• Portions of this content copyright 2012 Mozilla Contributors. This article contains work licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike License v2.5 or later. The original work is available at Mozilla Developer Network: Article