DOM is just not the way to build complex UI, we need to have control over the lower level draw loop and graphics, it's a pain to build a high level system on top of another high level system, it leads to hacks and unintuitiveness like react hooks. Building UI framework in canvas is way more fun and clean and the only way (in the browser) to think about UI programming from first principal, I dream of a browser environment where DOM / HTML is an optional library.
Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
591–600 of 953 posts
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#592Maybe because I am out of loop with web development, but this sounds like a huge change to me. So instead of HTML elements, there will be just one big element, and everything will be rendered there? How will text selection work for example? Will Google Docs basically implement a GUI library like GTK, which renders everything itself, but for the web?
I'm not sure but what you are suggesting is not outside the realm of possibility. There are already projects like https://makepad.dev/ which implement their GUI on top of WebGL. (Which is arguably more challenging than implementation on top of Canvas 2D.)
Perfect example of the pitfalls this approach has. I'm on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ and visited that site using Chrome for Android. I can't enter text as the on-screen keyboard is never activated.
Easy to fix, but these are the sorts of edge cases a canvas-only solution is going to have to deal with.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#593Does this mean I'll be able to jump to the end of a document without, like, 30 seconds of rendering computation?
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can ditch the off-screen rendered pages but you are still stuck with the entire 1000-page data structure. Should your current line be on page 997 or 998? You have to calculate the size of every line of every page to answer that.
Efficient 3 dimensional position or range queries (line/column/page) is a pretty well studied problem. You don't need to query every point of the space to answer anything.
I could not find clear references with an initial search. Can you expand a bit more about this approach? Thanks.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#595...how long before someone strips the browser and ships a runtime with no DOM, canvas and WASM/v9 only. Very platform independent and perhaps fast also...
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#596I think this is actually one of the few cases where canvas-based rendering makes sense as a replacement for the DOM. Docs is a full-featured application which already has to re-implement a lot of DOM-like features in order to fulfill its primary function (things like text formatting and layout, spell checking, etc). Doing it all in canvas doesn't sound significantly more difficult than what they're already doing. The…
This is a great example of a comment written by a developer or some otherwise technical person who is so used to thinking and speaking in terms of trees that they can't see the forest, let alone the village it's situated next to and the people inhabiting it. Google Docs may be an app, but a big part of the app, and confirmed to be one of the reasons for the migration here, is the part that renders the document to the…
If that's your point of view then no, the web has never been suited to spreadsheets, it was only suited to PowerPoint-like presentations when Opera had some nice markup for that functionality, and it is only suited for Word-like documents, with ugly hacks for equations.
In the end, you end up making Google's argument just stronger.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#597RIP web accessibility when everyone starts doing this to make ad blocking more difficult
Eh, I'll believe the slippery slope when I see it. Right now I think this move makes total sense since the dom is currently just being used as a rendering target and has to implement all its document-y behavior itself. Nothing about Google Docs uses the dom semantically and it already has to implement all its own accessibility support itself because without a lot of help screen readers would be useless.
To be fair, the web has been way down that slippery slope for over a decade now.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Word, Pages and Open Office don't seem to be bottlenecked by rendering performance like Google Docs. Perhaps the browser is the wrong platform for document editing.
It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing. Actually, now that the browser is so ubiquitous that GUIs sit on top of it (think Electron), then is time to ask the very obvious question - since everyone seems to agree that universal GUI is needed (proof: the browser) then is the browser the right universal GUI? Not being…
> It was indeed a very strong marketing move for... decades to convince people, like smart people, that document editing can be a web-based thing.
I think this is overly reductive. There was a technical problem driving some of this; namely - document collaboration sucked (to some degree still does).
Moving documents online was a tradeoff - making the editor web based solves a bunch of problems but causes some other ones; desktop based cloud backed editing didn't exist (not that it's perfect now) at a time when you could get useful collaboration done with web based editors.
I'm not saying this was the only thing going on, but reducing it to just "marketing" misses the mark, I think.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel. Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.
Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite. I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though. I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while colla…
> I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern.
How much of this is really related to technology? I do a lot of writing in both Word and Google Docs and see different sets of problems for both products. Having a group of people jump into either and expecting a good product (and experience getting there) is unrealistic.
With the pandemic, I think people have been trying lots of things without understanding what will be most effective. At least early on, there was a feeling that people had to be seen to be productive. It's nothing like real remote work.
For important docs, I still come back to having individuals write their content and only then does one person attempt to assemble it. The individuals often need their own independent reviews and consultation anyway before they have a decent draft. In some ways it improves visibility and helps with keeping folks on schedule too.
Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Google put ads on Google Docs? Anyway, adblockers that work at the network level should still work. This will make things more difficult for cosmetic removals though.
How will it work, if they are sending binary WASM blobs? This is akin to saying "pi hole can block ads in .exe files"
Sites have the right to try and subvert ad blocking if they want. I dont see the issue. Someone has to pay for free content.