World needs the Canvas API! (… and Graph API)
It is relatively easy to work with more conventional UIs - lists, grids, etc.
But node-based UI is something that typical HTML+CSS doesn’t lend to naturally.
The help from Obsidian developers can help a lot with visualizing our second brains in more organic way!
Obsidian team previously open-sourced the canvas format: https://jsoncanvas.org/
Would’ve been nice if Obsidian allowed to draw a navigable (not necessarily editable) Canvas from in-memory JSON.
Related:
- now that we’ve got Bases API, it is very desirable to have more tools to visualize our queries in meaningful ways
- Bases has great automate potential with Canvas - Plugins ideas - Obsidian Forum
- (while the topic is in Plugin Ideas, the harsh truth is, plugin developers are severely constrained by the lack of the Canvas API)
- Base: Add a Graph View (put graph view in base’s view menu) - Feature requests - Obsidian Forum
- (for Graph view in Bases we also need the API)
- Bases has great automate potential with Canvas - Plugins ideas - Obsidian Forum
- Quorafind/Obsidian-Bases-Canvas: A plugin to add obsidian canvas views for bases
- a plugin for Bases - lack of API didn’t stop someone, but…
- it is done by monkey patching the code, only for true Jedi coders…
- there still seems to be some weirdness about what it can achieve
- BETO.888/_RESOURCES/DATACORE/23 Canvas at main · beto-group/BETO.888
- alternative approach is to reinvent the wheel and make alternative bespoke implementation of canvas
- this won’t have the multiplicative effect of multiple tools using common APIs and data formats and still requires a lot of work for everyone taking this route
- This is so useful, it would be great if someone made a plugin for it : r/ObsidianMD
- some inspirational example
- we need the scaffolding for building node-based UIs for our workflows