3 ms·

"Canvas" was already taken at the time these APIs were becoming popular.

• kevingadd 6y ago
  typically terminology-wise I see "canvas" used to refer to a surface targeted by paint operations, vs other surfaces which may be read-only (contain an image you loaded from disk or a snapshot of a canvas at a previous point in time). In D3D terminology I think it's almost always been "surfaces" and "render targets", where the latter is something you can paint into. Surfaces are often broken down into levels, and don't necessarily contain image data (they can contain depth/stencil data for 3D rendering, for example)
  • foobiekr 6y ago
    Yes. In the pre-DirectX games SDK for Windows 95 it was a mix of “surface” and DIB (eg CreateCompatibleDIB). The win32 API was already using “canvas” in many places. Surface actually shows up in OS/2 Presentation Manager as well.