HTML Canvas element implemented in Flash?

Question

Can the HTML 5 Canvas element be implemented in Flash to provide support for that element in older browsers?

ExplorerCanvas can be included on a web page to allow emulation of Canvas in IE using VML. Since this is an IE-only solution, I would like to know if a similar replacement could be done using Flash, giving support for Canvas to all browsers.

Answer 1

i must say flashcanvas is the greatest one i know, which is surprised not mentioned!

Answer 2

There are 3 projects I know of that implemented canvas in flash, 2 are mentioned above.

1. http://code.google.com/p/fxcanvas/ - implements some things via a special "invoke" method so your code will have to be adjusted slightly if you use things like getImageData, the implementation of the special methods is a bit odd, it runs in a separate thread seemingly, so some things i can do with a real canvas don't seem possible right now if you depend on it.

2. flash-canvas - very basic, only a few simple operations supported

3. explorer-canvas - i.e. only, does not support any of the ImageData methods, otherwise quite good.

Sadly there does not seem to be a perfect flash implementation out there.

Answer 3

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/flash-canvas/

An implementation of the canvas tag using Flash.

Answer 4

For older browsers (namely IE), you can use ExplorerCanvas: http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/, which simulates canvas in IE using SVG I think.