WHATWG Weekly: HTML canvas version 5 has arrived
The StringEncoding proposal is getting closer to consensus. It now consists of a TextEncoder and a TextDecoder object that can be used both for streaming and non-streaming use cases. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Some bad news for a change. It may turn out that the web platform will only work on little-endian devices, as the vast majority of devices is little-endian today (computers, phones, …) and code written using ArrayBuffer today assumes little-endian. Boris Zbarsky gives a rundown of options for browsers on big-endian devices. Kenneth Russell thinks the situation can still be saved by universal deployment of DataView and sufficient developer advocacy.
Over the past couple of weeks the canvas element 2D API has gotten some major new features. Ian Hickson wrote a lengthy email detailing the canvas v5 API additions. Path primitives, dashed lines, ellipses, SVG path syntax, text along a path, hit testing, more text metrics, transforming patterns, and a bunch more.