Little about canvas
The canvas element is part of HTML5 and allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. It is a low level, procedural model that updates a bitmap and does not have a built-in scene graph.
Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use inside their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004, powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005 it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers, and Opera in 2006, and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.
Why canvas is cool?
Canvas consists of a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes. JavaScript code may access the area through a full set of drawing functions similar to those of other common 2D APIs, thus allowing for dynamically generated graphics. Some anticipated uses of canvas include building graphs, animations, games, and image composition.
Check a cool example that canvas does :
http://weavesilk.com
http://www.giuseppesicari.it/progetti/javascript-3d-model-viewer
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/FishIETank
http://craftymind.com/factory/html5video/CanvasVideo.html
http://blog.entheosweb.com/ideas/awesome-html5-canvas-animations-applications
More about canvas:
The w3c official description for the canvas element: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090825/the-canvas-element.html
