Somehow I missed the memo that David Anson (“Delay”), an employee at Microsoft, successfully created a Silverlight bridge for the HTML 5 canvas specification. Or that is to say, he implemented 100% support for several very important runtime tests for the HTML 5 canvas. And the great news is that it’s pretty fast, and from the vantage point of a couple comparison tests it renders a lot better (more accurately) than excanvas which runs at Google Code.

I was surprised further, however, that this fella’s released code was only accessible via his blog. I was shocked that this wasn’t a big open-source project—that is, it’s open source, and it’s a project, but it wasn’t on a source code repository system of any kind, at least not publicly.

So I asked him for permission to create a project for it on CodePlex so that it can be hosted there and continue growing with the efforts of the community. He gave me his blessing, so here it is:

http://slcanvas.codeplex.com/

David’s approach to implementing this was quite good, and actually very well-timed, because by waiting a couple years for canvas to mature he got his hands on some great canvas demos to build around. I am very impressed by David’s tenacity to implement this bridge with apparently 100% test conformance. People (particularly the IE team at Microsoft) just don’t push forward to 100% passing enough, what an example this guy made both to Microsoft and to the rest of us.

He told me it “was really just a learning exercise and proof-of-concept for me, I’d love to see someone go somewhere with it!” Me, too, David.

By the way, I was once told of a former co-worker who disassembled a Hummer down to its basic parts, and put it back together again, just for the learning exercise. To each his own, I guess. But then, in David’s case, we all benefit!