Are there any GUI toolkits for the canvas element in HTML5?

published Dec 15, 2011 12:03 by admin ( last modified Dec 15, 2011 12:03 )

Summary: Amino is the closest that I have found, although it seems to be more targeted towards interactive graphics and animation. Although I suppose a GUI is interactive graphics. Untested by me.

Why are there no GUI toolkits that simply do a away with clunky HTML form elements and instead manipulate the CANVAS element directly?

There are now implementations of VNC (noVNC, see my article here) and gtk that show that you can manipulate the canvas element pixel by pixel with enough speed to make it a fully fledged GUI.

A desktop user interface is vastly superior to HTML based user interfaces and with pixel-by-pixel control I could do so much better user interfaces for compound data and complex interactions. HTML is awkwardly retrofitted into service of something it was never intended to do.

So my question is, why not forego HTML elements completely and instead make something more like Qt, Gtk, Tk or wxwidgets in javascript for use directly inside a canvas element. You could even throw in a window manager there.

There is a question about this on Stackowerflow, but it was fielded back in 2009 and there aren't that many good answers posted, though Bespin is mentioned

Are there any GUI toolkits built on top of HTML Canvas like swing,swt,gtk or qt? So that it is possible to build applications like applets or flex gui:s inside the html canvas.

javascript - Are there any GUI toolkits built on top of HTML Canvas like swing,swt,gtk or qt? - Stack Overflow

A comment on Reddit by Chris McDonough originally set me thinking:

"Many modern web apps are written largely in JavaScript (or even Objective-C on the iPhone) and the server side is just a glorified pack mule that schleps data to and from a persistence engine. Things change."

Ok, we are moving from generating the GUI server side on the web, to generating it in the user's browser.