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Kind of strange to call it browserless as though Skia requires one to begin with. Been using the .NET Skia library in CLI and desktop applications for a while.
by MortyWaves 2y ago
Kind of strange to call it browserless as though Skia requires one to begin with. Been using the .NET Skia library in CLI and desktop applications for a while.
- Matheus28 2y agoIt's the "html canvas drawing api" that "browserless" refers to
- sroussey 2y agoNode is a browserless JS engine. I don’t see why saying browserless is weird.
- MortyWaves 2y agoI don’t think anyone ever thought Node was a browser thing though
- jasonjmcghee 2y agoThinking Node is related to the browser is not uncommon. They're both javascript and javascript means "browser" to a lot of (if not most) people.
- wslh 2y agoIs not only that, Node was born from the V8 implementation in Google Chrome, not the other way around.
- MortyWaves 2y agoSo that means everyone pretends node is a browser thing? Why stop there? Why not call every JS library that happens to run in Node “browserless”?
- wslh 2y agoThat answers the original question "Thinking Node is related to the browser is not uncommon." where Node and the browser ARE related.
- derefr 2y agoThey're not saying Skia itself is browserless; they're saying that "Skia Canvas" is a non-browser-based implementation of what people would normally call the browser Canvas API.
- wolfspider 2y agoAutomattic created node-canvas a long time ago which was based around Cairo.
- mrieck 2y agoYeah that's been around for a while - I used node-canvas to generate frames to render to mp4 for my HTML canvas animation site: https://www.superanimo.com https://www.superanimo.com Looks like it would have been a lot easier if this existed back then. (haven't worked on the site for 5+ years)
- dpe82 2y agoMy previous startup Vidmaker created a browser-based collaborative video editor (think Google Docs for iMovie) in 2014 which did live preview in the browser and final render server-side. To use the same typescript-based "engine" for both we re-implemented most of the media browser APIs in NodeJS: 2d and 3d canvas, WebAudio, image APIs, something akin to HTML Video, etc. It worked amazingly well. We got acqui-hired in 2015 and the product was shut down, but in hindsight I wish we'd open sourced at least those libraries.
- chearon 2y agoAutomattic acquired LearnBoost who employed TJ Holowaychuk, the original creator of node-canvas (and also Express and tons else). Automattic has not been involved in any way since at least 2017 when I joined node-canvas.
- pavlov 2y agoCanvas is one of the easiest browser APIs to implement because most of it maps 1:1 to PostScript-style 2D APIs. It was created by Apple as a wrapper for CoreGraphics back around Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. (IIRC, Canvas even debuted in Apple's Dashboard widgets rather than Safari? I'm not 100% sure.) I remember writing my own Canvas implementation around 2008-2009 using JavaScriptCore and CoreGraphics. It took maybe two days. I used it for a video application where JS plugins needed to render 2D graphics but I couldn't provide a browser engine because that would have been too slow and unpredictable for render functions that get called in the video render loop.