how efficient is the canvas

["Christopher T. Lansdown" <lansdoct screech cs alfred edu>]

Hi,
	I'm planning to use the canvas for displaying html.  Needless to
say, html pages can get quite big, much larger than a scrolled window.
Now, a number of projects manually attach scrollbars to a drawing area and
only draw that portion of a large pixmap that is needed, for speed and
memory reasons.  Does the canvas do the same thing if the viewport is
smaller than the canvas?  Is the canvas still efficient for very large
canvases (like the 5,000-15,000+ pixel sizes)?
	Also, is the canvas efficient with hundreds or even thousands of
text items?  Obviously they're going to take up RAM and so forth, I'm not
expecting the canvas to be magic, just is it reasonable to use it for
situations like that?  Thanks.
	-Chris

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