We would love to have you try Bespin
Unfortunately, we are using exciting new technology in HTML 5 that only leading browsers have implemented.
We want to push the Open Web forward, so for this tech preview you will have to use a new browser.
We have successfully tested Bespin on Firefox 3 and WebKit Nightly, so try one of them!
Oh well. :/
Canvas is fully supported in FF1.5+, Safari, Opera and Chrome out of the box. And you're only a short hack away from having Canvas emulation in IE5+. It's inexcusable not to build something like this cross-browser, when the underlying technology itself is cross-browser.
"This probably isn't going to work. What do you want to do?"
[Let me try anyway] [Get me a tested browser] [oh, nevermind]
I understand the behavior as it stands for things like banking or medical websites, where real life things of value are at stake and non-experts may use it, but this is demonstrating an experimental widget on a "labs" site, where the whole point is to try out weird new stuff in browsers.
This wouldn't have been so noteworthy, except that Netscape/Mozilla/FF just spent a decades fighting "browser-ism" and even have a bugzilla category for it: (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407187 as an example)
It seems to work ok, although it's not as full featured as their system.
As for me, though... they will pry Emacs out of my cold, dead hands.
Very interested to see the code and how they did all this in Canvas in a sensible way.
I'm really amazed at the performance. This is Javascript, drawing characters pixel-by-pixel? Whoa.
It's sort of like the days of IE4 vs NN3, with two technologies doing the same thing with a small common set of things you can do in both. Only now it's Canvas vs. SVG. You can accomplish a lot of stuff, and both can do a lot more, but there's just not enough overlap right now to really build anything truly cool.
