Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#441

Post by mihcsab » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

aardvarkr wrote: post #326

mihcsab wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It`s not slow on an old intel i3 laptop and on a motorola one phone. I keep seeing these comments about flutter web with different examples, they are never slow on my old devices. Also you can make the text selectable if you want to.

Just loaded it and it ran awfully. We all have anecdotal experiences and it doesn’t make yours any less valid than mine but it does point out that they don’t show much besides what you personally experienced.

wdym by awfully? This makes me crazy, the gallery loaded instanltly, every item I click loads instantly, no problem with scrolling. There is a five second loading delay on the phone when the app loads, the items after that open just as fast as on the laptop.

The only thing I saw that didn'r run smoothly on my weak phone is the flutter plasma demo[0], but it runs without any tearing on the laptop.

[0] https://flutterplasma.dev/

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#442

Post by acituan » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…

> I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer.

Google is also a search company, the product from which the majority of their ad revenue comes. Blobifying the web indiscriminately breaks search, so it is not in their interest to push this to reap some x% revenue loss from ad blockers.

Incidentally, or not, a traditional wordprocessor itself is not an interesting search result and makes a perfect candidate for this type of rendering. There already exists compatibility layers with search for published documents. So absolutely nothing is lost for anyone, and I think it is an overgeneralization to take this as a sign of obvious doom to come.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#443

Post by breck » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #378

burlesona wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for what it’s worth, “word processors” are a logical starting point specifically because the APIs for text manipulation in the DOM are abysmal, and every in-browser WYSIWYG text editor is a steaming pile of hacks. Some of them work well despite this, but, it’s a horrible set of code to maintain and very, very hard to make a good user experience. One of the very hardest things to do well in the browser, actually.…

A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spread…

> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.

About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2, nowadays https://treenotation.org/). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental universal notation of the universe, which you can think of as "two-dimensional binary". I predict we will soon see a Cambrian Explosion of new formats and languages that are simpler and more interoperable with each other, and some will have the opportunity to build new great languages for rendering stacks.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#444

Post by brabel » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

mrighele wrote: post #362

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had these exact complaints about web apps many years ago, and I was dead wrong. Nobody cared that web apps were slow, had/has horrible UX compared to native apps, and feel janky by comparison. These demos elicit similar feelings. Now, they're not as fast as I like, but they feel better than most webapps already. (It reminds me of Flash, actually.) If the Flutter dev experience is good enough, this will eat traditio…

Despite their shortcomings webapps won because they had a number of advantages that native lacked, most of all software distribution. What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks? (not performance, it seems)

The fact that it (the same code base with minor changes) runs on desktop and mobile platforms?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#445

Post by asumandiras » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

despite the fears of locking down the web, this is really neat from a UI/UX perspective. i'm assuming they're using flutter to do the rendering. is anyone working on an open sourced js framework that also does render to canvas UI?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#446

Post by mondoshawan » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #269

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one would welcome the death of HTML and CSS. Unfortunately I suspect they will merely be re-used for this.

Why? They are the best layouting tools we have to this day. Or do you want to go back to TextElement textElement = new TextElement(); textElement.position(100, 100); textElement.color(Colors.RED); textElement.alignment(Alignment.CENTER); ... and the likes? These kind of descriptional ui tools are horrible in my opinion.

...and yet we still have these things, like Gtk, Tk, ImGUI, some parts of Qt, etc, and they work reasonably well. I just spent time building a new widget set for small LCD screens (~160x40) and built the set in as simple a way as I could, and this was the easiest method to do so. Sure, it's not great from a designer perspective, but it gets the job done -- more or less what HTML + CSS do now, but (frankly) in a far less verbose way.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#447

Post by zffr » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

calderwoodra wrote: post #412

DrJokepu wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, you know, accessibility. This could be a real serious problem for people with disabilities.

Accessibility is a first class citizen in flutter. https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-local...

I wish that page mentioned how accessibility works for Flutter websites. Seems to only mention Android and iOS.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#448

Post by agency » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

vagrantJin wrote: post #438

bri3d wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spread…

The dom isn't trash. Its good enough. We just need to stop making it do things it wasn't supposed to. That's why things like electron make sense a little bit. Not perfect but sensible.

Isn't Electron rendering to an embedded Chromium and therefore the DOM as well?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#449

Post by breck » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

vagrantJin wrote: post #438

bri3d wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spread…

The dom isn't trash. Its good enough. We just need to stop making it do things it wasn't supposed to. That's why things like electron make sense a little bit. Not perfect but sensible.

I'd agree. I think the DOM is fantastic, *unless* you are doing advanced document manipulation, in which case it is trash (for that use case only). This is what I'm assuming the author meant.

I spent many years working on that sort of thing, a decade ago.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#450

Post by baybal2 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable…

You are completely correct. The end goal of people who introduced WASM was an ActiveX 2.0.