Canvas is one of the only web APIs that's simple enough to understand in one reading, yet flexible enough to be a real application primitive — and that's becaus

Canvas is one of the only web APIs that's simple enough to understand in one reading, yet flexible enough to be a real application primitive — and that's because it wasn't originally designed for the web, but was simply a lightweight wrapper around CoreGraphics for Apple's Dashboard in Mac OS X. Maybe Apple should have provided an NSView wrapper too, with a drawRect() method to draw into a canvas, and made DOM elements part of that view tree. That would have been a much simpler API for web components than what the committees came up with.