Whats will the html5 canvas actually be used for apart from paint type programs?

I know that html 5 canvas will allow for paint style image creating and manipulation, 开发者_开发知识库but what use does this really have? I just don't really understand all the hype when the practice use seems limited.

Thanks

GAMES! That's what I'm using it for. Diagonal lines, spinning cubes, triangles (all previously very difficult in basic HTML) are now easy. Combine this with Node.js and you've got COMET backed multi-player GAMES!!! All without the user needing to download Flash or Silverlight or whatever...

Here's some sources on the subject:

http://www.canvasdemos.com/type/games/

Creating a live checkers-like web app with PHP, JS, CSS and HTML?

Other than this, I guess you could use it to "Paint" your website. Instead of using images for gradients, buttons, whatever you could use the canvas instead. Could be more performant since it would reduce the amount of files the client needs to download, but do you really want to programmatically draw all your images??? Not sure about that, but for some images, like gradients, I could see it being useful.

Oh! I would daresay that you haven't seen good HTML5 + CSS3 implementations.
Check these wonders on Canvas.

1. CSS3-Man
2. Ball Droppings ( Bonus: View Source to see the wonderfully commented source code)

And if that didn't leave you dumbstruck, check out the wonderful website http://www.chromeexperiments.com for pretty nifty canvas works.
Plus, do you know that there is a new library called processing.js for these kind of stuff.

You just don't see it production much because, browsers haven't fully adopted HTML5 yet. But they soon will. That being said, please open all these examples on a Web-Kit Browser (Google Chrome or Apple Safari) for better results.