How to Use the new HTML5 Canvas Element

About the canvas element in HTML5 - The canvas element is part of HTML5 and allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. It is a low level, procedural model that updates a bit map and does not have a built in scene graph. The canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use inside their own Mac OS X WebKit component, powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, it was adopted by Gecko browsers and Opera and standardized by the WHATWG on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.

Canvas tutorial