[mcclim-devel] Yet another half-baked half-finished backend

[Christophe Rhodes]

Hi,

I'm aware that we're accumulating broken backends faster than we are
fixing them, but I'd still like to make a case for including another.
Over the course of yesterday, I built enough of a backend based on the
WHATWG (HTML 5) group's <canvas> widget that code which is essentially
  (with-output-to-canvas (s file)
    (gsharp:draw-buffer s buffer))
produces
  <http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01cr/tmp/rapsoden-mostly-correct.html>
(best viewed with something that's not IE; also, please don't tell me
that it tells you about not supporting <canvas> even though it does).

I should warn that I'm one Web Coder short of a project; I don't
really have a feeling for how to take this backend much further:
specifically, missing features that are moderately essential are text
(<canvas> doesn't support text; apparently styled <div>s are the way
forward) -- which would get the backend about up to Postscript levels
of functionality -- and interactivity, which would be utterly cool but
clearly won't work currently given that that html file is about 1MB
big.  So, any ideas?

The backend itself is about 400 lines of code; should I just go ahead
and check it in, or does anyone have any reservations?

Cheers,

Christophe