[OpenLayers-Users] Pros and cons of the various renderers? (SVG, SVG2, Canvas)

[Andreas Hocevar]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Phil Scadden <p.scadden at gns.cri.nz> wrote:
>
>>
>> SVG2 is deprecated and no longer maintained.
>
> Hmm. The release notes for 2.11 say:
> "New SVG2 renderer. By default, OpenLayers still uses the SVG renderer,
> but the new one has several advantages:"

That was in 2.11. Since then, we found many issues (especially with
limited coordinate range) that cannot be addressed without introducing
geometry clipping like in the SVG renderer, which would make SVG2
basically the same as SVG.

> I assumed from that, that OL was moving to SVG2. If rendering works on
> OL with SVG2 and Canvas but not with SVG, then it sounds like I should
> indeed log the bug.

Yes, please do so. And make sure to include a minimal example that
shows the issue.

>> Canvas is initially fast
>> for rendering many vertices, but it is not good if you don't do many
>> interactive symbolizer changes (e.g. feature selection with visual
>> feedback) on layers with tons of features, because it has to redraw
>> the whole viewport for every such change. SVG supports a few more
>> symbolizer properties than Canvas, but Canvas is catching up.
>>
> Thanks for that. Are there browser differences to worry about as well?

Not that I know.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Hocevar
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.