Use HTML5 Canvas to capture part of a web page?

Question

I know that you can capture images from an HTML5 video stream using canvas and display them on the page. What I am interested in is can you use the canvas object to create an ov

Answer 1

This gets asked a lot. The short answer is that it can't be done for security reasons.

The longer answers include mention of the drawWindow function that only FireFox has, which only works locally (again, for security reasons). In the future it may work once the user gives permission, like in the case of the Java applets of today. In the future, it might even be part of the spec and not a one-off thing done by Mozilla.

If you're feeling crazy, you could attempt to make an entire HTML renderer, take the DOM tree for the page, and attempt to render it in Canvas. This is a fool's errand.