In the last few days, I have been working on a VT100 terminal entirely built within a web page. I use the HTML5 Canvas feature to draw the terminal surface and AJAX to a dedicated C# built server for the data flow. Well, I had this small annoying problem that the Canvas feature is not supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8. Since a lot of users use IE, it's an annoyance I wanted to try to fix. So, last night I went looking for something that could be an alternative to canvas on IE. Typed in "HTML5 Canvas IE" in Google and soon after found my solution.

ExplorerCanvas is a Javascript that emulate the Canvas feature inside IE. It does almost a perfect job. It uses the SVN vector drawing surface to emulate the Canvas. At first I had a few problems because some of the Javascript I had written was Firefox specific so, I did have to spend a few hours fixing up my own Javascript but after that, it worked! I have a fully working terminal surface in IE. The only small problem is that the canvas surface in IE can't scale with the browse width like in Firefox. So you are stuck with a terminal of a set size. This could be annoying if the size I select is way to big or way to small for your display. Still, a big move forward.

Ylian
meshcentral.homeip.net