The canvas API

The <canvas> element comes with a rich scripting API that exposes methods and properties allowing us to define and control the shapes that are drawn on the canvas. The API can be broken down into distinct sections depending on what the methods do.

The canvas element

The <canvas> element itself has a couple of methods that can be called on it, including:

Method	Usage
getContext(a)	Returns an object (a CanvasRenderingContext2D object to be precise) which can then have other methods from the API called on it to manipulate the <canvas>. The argument specifies the type of context to retrieve. Only two dimensional contexts are available at present.
toDataURL()	Returns a data URL representing the image on the <canvas>. Optional arguments include the type of image represented by the data URL (with the default being image/png), and any arguments specific to the type, such as the quality for image/jpg data URLs.

The <canvas> element can be thought...

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