Drawing a phylogeny in a web browser using the canvas element

Some serious displacement activity. I'm toying with adding phylogenies to iSpecies, probably sourced from the PhyLoTA browser. This raises the issue of how to display trees on a web page. PhyLoTA itself uses bitmap images, such as this one:

but I'd like to avoid bitmaps. I toyed with using SVG, but that has it's own series of issues (it basically has to be served as a separate file). So, I've spent a couple of hours playing with the <canvas> element. This enables some quite nice drawing to be down in a browser window, without plugins, SVG, or Flash. I wrote a quick PHP script to parse a Newick tree and draw it using <canvas>. It's really pretty simple, and the results are quite nice:

One minor gotcha is interacting with the diagram (this is one advantage of SVG). Turns out we need a hack, so I've used the trick of a blank, transparent GIF and a usemap (see Greg Houston's Canvas Pie Chart with Tooltips). The picture above is a screen shot, you can see a live example here.