HTML 5 <canvas> Tag

Your browser does not support the canvas tag. At the time of writing, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome support this tag.

Here's an image of what it's supposed to look like.

The HTML <canvas> tag is used for creating graphics on the fly. It can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images.

To draw on the canvas, the <canvas> tag is used in conjunction with the getContext(contextId) method.

Any content between the <canvas></canvas> tags is "fallback content"- meaning, it will be displayed only if the canvas cannot be displayed.

The <canvas> tag was introduced in HTML 5.

Attributes

HTML tags can contain one or more attributes. Attributes are added to a tag to provide the browser with more information about how the tag should appear or behave. Attributes consist of a name and a value separated by an equals (=) sign, with the value surrounded by double quotes. Here's an example, style="color:black;".

There are 3 kinds of attributes that you can add to your HTML tags: Element-specific, global, and event handler content attributes.

The attributes that you can add to this tag are listed below.

Element-Specific Attributes

The following table shows the attributes that are specific to this tag/element.

AttributeDescription
widthSpecifies the canvas width in pixels. The default value is 300.

Possible values:

[Non-negative integer] (for example, 300)

heightSpecifies the canvas height in pixels. The default value is 150.

Possible values:

[Non-negative integer] (for example, 150)

Global Attributes

The following attributes are standard across all HTML 5 tags (although the tabindex attribute does not apply to dialog elements).

For a full explanation of these attributes, see HTML 5 global attributes.

Event Handler Content Attributes

Event handler content attributes enable you to invoke a script from within your HTML. The script is invoked when a certain "event" occurs. Each event handler content attribute deals with a different event.

For a full list of event handlers, see HTML 5 event handler content attributes.