Question

I’ve seen on some websites using the <canvas> tag with javascript to draw text and add text styling. What practical advantages are there to generating text in the <canvas> tag compared to normal text styled with CSS3?

Answer 1

The use cases should dictate your choice. Nevertheless, I’ll try to give my thoughts on this rather general question:

1. If you just have to write some text, using canvas would be a very bad idea, because it will be much slower than CSS and your text won’t be accessible (for the moment).
2. If you have to place the text very accurately over some drawing, or the text is included in an animation, canvas could be an option (depending on the complexity of the drawing / animation). But you should consider SVG too in this case.