This content is over 14 years old. It may be obsolete and may not reflect the current opinion of the author.

Of course, we all know that Web has become more and more an application platform than an information medium. Such argument could holds true, evidentially, is by the invention of the element <canvas>: before canvas, every HTML tag was invented to host some type of content or metadata; Javascript, or other client-side scripts, heavy or lightweight, rich or sample, do nothing more than manipulating those data (and replace them with new data fetched by XMLHttpRequest or JSON-P).

<canvas>, however, is the only element doesn’t come with content. Without script, canvas is nothing more than a blank block space. It is, indeed, a canvas for Javascript to “paint” its computation result. You cannot specify any content with element attribute; without script the canvas itself doesn’t make any sense.

Years from now, when people talk about the history of advancement of Web technologies, I believed notions like this would eventually reveal itself; just like what happened when we talked about the day when <img> is invented.

Food for thought.