I am playing around with the Kinetic js framework. I was working on a painting application and ran into trouble regarding the placement of shapes on the stage. It turned out to be that be cause I set the html5 canvas to be my container for the stage the shapes would not show up...
This raises the question, If I am no longer using the canvas as my container do I lose all functionality of the canvas? Is there a way whereby I can place a kinetic stage on the canvas?
I just answered this in a comment to your other question, but I'll answer here too. KineticJS expects a div for the stage container, then creates the canvas elements inside that div, so don't worry about 'not using them'.
If you use some kind of HTML element inspector in your application, you'll see that the div contains canvas elements even though you didn't add any manually; for each layer you add to the stage, Kinetic will add a canvas element and stack them on top of each other.