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.
Hey thanks for [3] obsidian-skills, I've been using Obsidian for years and Claude for months and it's time for them to meet! Stoked to check it out. :)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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".
An "infinite" canvas without some notion of recursion such as viewports feels incomplete.
Obsidian's implementation of JSON Canvas supports this.
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?