Quoted from HTML5 Canvas vs. SVG vs. div
- SVG is probably better for applications and apps with few items (less than 1000? Depends really)
- Canvas is better for thousands of objects and careful manipulation, but a lot more code (or a library) is needed to get it off the ground.
- HTML Divs are clunky and do not scale, making a circle is only possible with rounded corners, making complex shapes is possible but involves hundreds of tiny tiny pixel-wide divs. Madness ensues.
A lot of DOM objects(thousands range) with events attached is going to be very painful for some machines to handle. Since it's only 200 here, it may not be a problem. Still performance increases when using canvas over SVG and over compositing images using the DOM.