I'm not sure why it popped up today, but it's nice to see it on HN again! A brief timeline with some links to past discussions:

- 2022: The .canvas open format was created for Obsidian Canvas [0].

- 2024: Official 1.0 spec of JSON Canvas [1].

- 2024-2025: A number of apps/libraries built up around conversion, storage, and import/export [2].

- 2026: Obsidian Skills [3] includes support for .canvas (along with .md and .base) to make it easy for LLMs to read/write JSON Canvas, and opens interesting visualization/interaction patterns with agents.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670922

[2]: https://jsoncanvas.org/docs/apps/

[3]: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills

It would be useful to have examples of data and the representation this would result in.

Although you can go to https://jsoncanvas.org/ itself and see an example rendering, you cannot see the exact data that created it - I think, although you can sort of guess since the element names are stuff like node.

I sort of doubt this is the best data structure for representing this kind of thing. Maybe I'm wrong though but I would think I would go for something like https://github.com/jsongraph/json-graph-specification which strikes me as closer to graphml which I have some experience with, and maybe give it ability to embed videos etc. (which for all I know someone already has)

This is all an initial feeling though, like hmm, no I think it's wrong, and maybe I am just not seeing why this would be better than another solution.

• kepano

  today at 6:50 PM

  You can see the data it created. Just click "Toggle output" in the bottom right corner.

  • crazygringo

    today at 8:05 PM

    Oh, thanks. Those buttons seem designed to be as inconspicuous as possible.

    This just looks like a pretty normal homepage. It was not obvious to me at all that the homepage was an actual dynamically rendered canvas, as opposed to just canvas-"themed".

  • bryanrasmussen

    today at 7:28 PM

    ah ok, sorry about that. I didn't really look at that part of the UI much, noticed it had some zoom stuff, noticed I couldn't zoom normally and scroll to where I wanted to read, was somewhat miffed.

Previously posted in 2022 as Obsidian Canvas before being open sourced in 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824

I've used canvas quite a bit since it was release in Obsidian. It's good, not great, but the simplicity of the file type opens up a lot of opportunities to build on top of it.

• big_toast

  today at 8:07 PM

  It took me a while to start using canvases. But now I think they should be a much more common UI pattern. They really shine on large (40"+ non-retina 4k) screens. The simplicity at launch made me feel more confident in using them at all. I don't use most of the other obsidian features/plugins.

I'm not sure about this:

An "infinite" canvas without some notion of recursion such as viewports feels incomplete.

• kepano

  today at 7:54 PM

  A file node can be a .canvas, so a .canvas can have nested canvases.

  Obsidian's implementation of JSON Canvas supports this.

Looks cool. I recently hit some limits with mermaid and this seems a little more flexible.

Are pixels really the best way to encode position at this point?

• Garlef

  today at 7:24 PM

  Agreed.

  The upside is that it does not leave the most important aspect open to interpretation.

  But it prevents this from being text-only at the point of creation:

  You'll most likely need some programmatic environment to create non-trivial diagrams.

  But then the question is: Why not just an SVG instead?

• 9wzYQbTYsAIc

  today at 7:54 PM

  I’m playing with 3d positions derived from higher dimensions, right now.