Use Silverlight version of excanvas if possible

[GoogleCodeExporter]

excanvas traditionally converted canvas commands into VML elements Internet 
Explorer for 
Windows understands. There's now a new alternate version of excanvas that 
translates canvas 
commands into Silverlight. It's not part of the latest excanvas 0002 release, 
but is in their repository 
and will presumably be part of excanvas 0003.

The Silverlight version has at least two benefits that I can see: 1. images are 
drawn well (see issue 
#41 for why they're not drawn well with the VML version); 2. lines are drawn 
the correct thickness.

I don't want to use the Silverlight version of excanvas exclusively because 
that would require that 
the Microsoft Silverlight plugin be installed, and one of the properties of 
Canviz I rather like is that 
it doesn't require any browser plugins.

It would be nice if Canviz would determine at runtime whether Silverlight is 
installed, and then 
dynamically load either the VML excanvas.js or the Silverlight excanvas.js, 
using the same dynamic 
loading technique in issue #20. Microsoft shows here how you can determine if 
Silverlight is 
installed:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightjs


Note that all of this is applicable to Internet Explorer on Windows only. All 
other browsers would 
continue to use the native browser canvas as they do now.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by ryandesi...@gmail.com on 31 Dec 2008 at 8:50

[GoogleCodeExporter]

ExplorerCanvas release 3 is out, and it does not contain the Silverlight 
version. When asked about this on the 
mailing list, the developers said this is because of some outstanding issues 
with the Silverlight script, and that 
they plan to merge the Silverlight and VML versions into a single script. So 
for Canviz we may not have to do 
anything but wait for this to happen.

http://groups.google.com/group/google-excanvas/browse_thread/thread/e2d9dc2ee588
0912

Original comment by ryandesi...@gmail.com on 19 May 2009 at 10:42