Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by petilon 4370 days ago
Canvas is bitmap-based, while SVG is vector. If you need to print the chart SVG is going to look a lot better. Also, if you pinch-zoom the chart, SVG is going to look better. Canvas doesn't support animation -- you have to code it yourself. SVG performance is quite good unless you have thousands of elements, which a chart isn't going to have.
1 comments

> Canvas doesn't support animation -- you have to code it yourself.

What do you mean?

The obvious. That canvas is just a set of pixels with colors (a bitmap image). To get animation, you have to explicitly change them every X milliseconds.

Whereas SVG has actual objects, that you can apply items like animateTransform, animateMotion etc to them directly, in a declarative style.

Ok, thanks. I didn't know that. I thought you had to clear/redraw the SVG for animation as well.