Thursday, July 28, 2011

Raphael on Android

For those of you who liked the fantastic HTML5 canvas manipulation tool called Raphael and were thinking of using it for your Android web apps, I'd like to highlight one caveat. It has 2 rendering engines, an SVG based one and a VML based one.
VML is heading for obsolescence a I understand it. However, this has deep support in IE and Raphael renders on IE using VML. On all the other platforms it uses SVG.

This is actually a good thing under most circumstances, SVG support being ubiquitous and good.
The problem? The Android development team uses Webkit for their system browser which supports SVG. However, to save on space/resources, during the build process on Android, the SVG support is disabled. At least for all Android versions upto V3.0.

This means Raphael will not work for your Android projects. Unless of course the VML renderer can be enabled for Android dynamically and VML works for Android?...

No comments: