I'm building an application on top of canvas, it consists of a simple DOM that gets redrawn on every mouse move (yes, it is necessary), for performance issues not every part part gets redrawn only what is needed.
The app is working well but I'd like to add the zoom feature, the way I see it, it can be done in three different ways:
1 - Every DOM element gets recalculated (position and size) every time a user zooms in or out - it might have issues with precision and its not a very good abstraction
2 - The canvas has a resolution property (i.e. when the user zooms out resolution might change from 1 to .75) - there will be a need to make the calculations on every redraw
3 - Use the built in translate() and scale() methods - possibly the most elegant and fastest solution, however it is not intuitive at all, it might be difficult to understand how it is being done latter on by me or someone else (these methods work on the full canvas, first you would translate and scale on the canvas and afterwards everything you draw gets 'magicly' translated and scaled)
Which one is best or are there other possibilities I'm not thinking of?