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