How to render Bitmap into Canvas?

What is the highest performance way to render a grid of thousands of tiles in a web browser?

• DIVs? HTML5 canvas?

• Answer:

  Depends on the browser, what you'd put in the divs, etc.  Try a few different approaches in the browsers that matter to you in order to get an idea.  That said, I would expect canvas to be faster than thousands of divs.  Approaches other than canvas or divs that might bear fruit depending on the specifics: preprocessed imagery, table layouts, flash, and webGL. Multi-scale zoomable imagery   http://zoom.it/pages/api/ (http://Zoom.it is the new name for Seadragon)   http://openzoom.org Using custom map tiles  http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes.html#CustomMapTypes http://www.microsoft.com/maps/isdk/ajax/ http://mapnik.org/faq/ http://tilestache.org/   (influenced by the older http://tilecache.org/) http://modestmaps.com/ http://www.mapstraction.com/ A couple editable table/grid implementations  http://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/wiki http://www.datatables.net/