I am reading about Bespin all over the place, with a lot of focus on
SVG versus canvas, canvas not working in Internet Explorer, etc.
I don't know Bespin's plans in this area, but lots of projects which use
canvas (such as flot) also test with and provide excanvas, which
uses IE's VML support to provide the basic canvas API. I have read
that excanvas does not work in IE8's standards mode, however it does
work in quirks mode.
There seems to be lots of little explosions of creativity around the
combination of faster Javascript interpreters and canvas, like these
"3D in 2D" demos, Box2D physics (this works in IE8 thanks to
excanvas).
I've been working on a project which does graphs and other data
visualization in the browser. I ended up using jquery and flot although
raphael (which uses SVG or VML, so supports IE) was in the running as
well. Working with raphael is neat because everything you create is a
DOM object so it's a lot like working with HTML, but in the end flot
just has many more out-of-the-box features like selection support,
timescales, and so on. Not having IE support is not an option, and I'd
rather not depend on Flash or other plugin if at all possible; I am
quite pleased that there are a ton of reasonable ways to acheive this
given those constraints.
I know this stuff is obvious to most of us around here, but I'm
surprised that excanvas doesn't come up more in these discussions. It is
obviously not as ideal as having honest-to-goodness canvas or SVG
support in all major browsers, but it's a very creative way to drag IE
along, putting a Javascript wrapper around their similar-but-different
native feature.