Background: I have extensive development background, but the last time I coded a game was many years ago. My Javascript skills are quite limited, and I intend to improve them by building a simple game — Tetris, Pac-man, or something of that complexity level.

Question: It seems to me that a fundamental choice I need to make is whether I should render on a <canvas> element or not.

With a canvas, I have basic tools for rendering points, lines, and more complex things on top of that. Presumably there are, or will be, also various frameworks to help with this.

Without a canvas, I could keep my objects in the DOM-tree, like a regular webpage, only quite complex, with many overlapping elements.

Is one approach better than the other? Are they mutually exclusive? How do I know which to pick?