I see your point. Thanks for posting this code - I implemented the a* pathfinding algorithm in javascript, so I looked into some of these options also. I ended up using the basic 2d structure to store the grid, since it was the most straightforward and seemed somewhat equivalent to 1d.

For a demo of it (http://briangrinstead.com/files/astar/), I used divs to represent the grid on the page, but I think it would be awesome to use the canvas grid representation since I suspect it will have much better performance than thousands of divs on the page (switch it to 100x100 to see what I mean).