That seems like a moderately weak argument. DOM tables are slow, but if you know what you are doing the DOM is otherwise an insanely fast interface. You can get

That seems like a moderately weak argument. DOM tables are slow, but if you know what you are doing the DOM is otherwise an insanely fast interface. You can get sub-nanosecond response speed from DOM calls in Firefox (faster than a billion operations per second). It would be interesting to see the performance differences in numbers. The performance impact of a canvas based approach can be approximated from measuring the performance of heavy SVG animations on GPU load.