Widgets for animation - any advantages?

[David Bovill]

I've been looking at widgets. One advantage is the ability to do splines
and paths. I'm wandering about the sort of things that will be faster if we
code it in a widget, than if we use Livescript.

For instance what about raster images - voting them painting areas of the
canvas? Is that possible? Is it faster than moving and image object or
button with a background pattern? How about other drawing routines?

Also a fundamental question - what is the relationship between the canvas
object that browsers use - and the way widgets draw to screen. None I
guess? I'm wondering as some things are amazingly fast when drawn to the
browser canvas - do we get the same sort of hardware acceleration when we
use the native widget routines?