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Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#651

Post by neurostimulant »

swyx wrote: post #511
neurostimulant wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, afaik Flutter web is already rendering its components in canvas instead of DOM [1]. Text selection works, but kinda jarring and opt-in instead of opt-out. If the developer forgot to enable text selection in an element then the user can't select and copy the text in that element at all. It might be an indicator that google will continue with this approach going forward. [1] https://flutter.dev/web

so the bigger story is... is Google Docs switching to Flutter Web? is that what's going on here?

Not necessarily. Only the text rendering is done in canvas, which indicates they don't switch to flutter because in flutter everything is in a canvas. But if google, a major player in w3c and whatwg, decides that they don't want to use dom anymore and go through a great length to re-implement a major feature in canvas, this might indicates that this approach is beneficial enough and might double down on this route in the future.

If they simply dissatisfied with dom feature, they can simply influence the standard to make the feature they wanted happen like they always do.

As to why they don't want to use dom and instead use canvas at great expense of re-implementing a lot of basic text handling and accessibility feature, one can only guess. My take is moving to canvas will be beneficial to google because they can effectively kill dom-based adblocker, so it's only logical to start experimenting with canvas-only web applications.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#652

Post by incrudible »

hctaw wrote: post #329
larodi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel the need to argue that the browser is not the browser engine. An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths. Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms. They also have the benefit of persistence, filesystem access, hooks into native code sh…

> An app sitting in a chrome tab is significantly different than an app built on electron, they just share some rendering code paths.

That isn't really true, Electron is basically a thin veneer over the Chrome browser, with NodeJS tacked on the side. Just take a look at the source code.

> Electron apps have shown that you can use a browser's rendering engine to make high quality apps distributed on multiple platforms.

Electron has shown that you can use a re-skinned browser and NodeJS to ship applications on all platforms capable of running Chrome. That ranges somewhere between "acceptable tradeoff" and "absolute overkill", depending on the application.

> You don't have memory limitations, and you don't have to worry about browser sandboxing, malicious or well intentioned extensions that break the experience, etc.

You still do have almost all of the limitations of a web browser in your rendering code, and you have none of the features of the web browser outside of it. The bridge between the two is inefficient.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#653

Post by orangecat »

user-the-name wrote: post #339
falcolas wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML and CSS are fantastic; when used what they were designed for. Document markup and display. I blame webapp developers for the scope creep and subsequent denigration of a perfectly reasonable set of standards.

CSS has absolutely never been good at what it was designed for. It is meant to display a document. It took TWENTY YEARS before it got support for showing text in columns, the most basic of basic things in how text is often displayed. It is only now, after twenty-five years, getting a way to specify the aspect ratio of an element. It's an awful, awful joke.

CSS was originally intended to consolidate document style information, so you didn't have to repeat "24 point bold, blue" for all your section titles. It's pretty good for that, but then we somehow decided that it should also handle the entirely separate job of page layout. Which led to years of standards people yelling at us to use CSS and not tables, and then plugging their ears when asked how to implement complex designs like vertically centered text.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#654

Post by idiotsecant »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #390
highwind wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?

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.

i think copying some cells from excel into outlook, which i guess is the comparable transaction, works pretty well - what doesn't work for you? Maybe I am just missing out on some amazing functionality by not using google docs.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#655

Post by SebastianKra »

notyourwork wrote: post #3

I don't build extensions or work on much front end web lately but this reads like Google wants more control over their stuff. The web is becoming less open. > By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated. > If you are building your own integrations with Google Docs, we recommend using Google Work…

I did a small project where I drew a large animated graph with SVG. Despite careful optimization, it ran at a mediocre frame rate and kept spinning up my fans. I know about another project (whiteboard with notes) that ran into the same issues.

PowerPoint, Miro and Figma all run in the Canvas. I don't blame Google for doing the same.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#656

Post by breck »

lambda wrote: post #645
breck wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Hey, nice! I have a notes file experimenting with a similar tree-style minimalist data notation; it's definitely an area that needs more exploration. I like what you've done with it, I'll need to take a closer look. While I was thinking about it, I also decided to take a look into prior art, which took me all the way back to Landin's "The Next 700 Programming Languages" from 1966 which introduced the hypothetical lan…

Yes, and surprisingly there are not too many that use any indentation based syntax (about 1 in 50). However, of the ones that do (abc, aldor, boo, buddyscript, cobra, coffeescript, csl, curry, elixir, f-sharp, genie, haml, haskell, inform, iswim, literate-coffeescript, livescript, madcap-vi, madcap, makefile, markdown, miranda, nemerle, net-format, nim, occam, org, promal, python, restructuredtext, sass, scss, spin, stylus, xl-programming-language, yaml) there are some real gems.

Some more interesting read's in this space:

2003 - Egil Möller's I-expressions - https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

1984 - Alan Kay's 3-D spreadsheet - http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20Computer%20Software%20-...

1972 - Mark Wells' A Review of Two-Dimensional Programming Languages - http://sci-hub.cc/10.1145/942576.807009

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#657

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

heipei wrote: post #613
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Zoho have a self-hosted version? If not, is there any reason to trade one vendor lock for another?

I consider neither Zoho nor Google Docs to be vendor lock-in since you can always download the documents as docx and continue working on them locally. I'm gonna give Zoho Writer a spin since Google Docs is missing some vital features for me, most notably the option to have custom page designs (font/colors/footers) that you can centrally update and apply to a bunch of documents. If anyone has another Google Docs alter…

Vendor lock-in is an inability to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. [1]

Changing Google Docs for .docx has significant costs, because their compatibility with MS Office is far from ideal. That said, using .docx is yet another vendor lock-in. As you might know, OOXML is not a true open standard: it was recognized as such by ISO only due to Microsoft's shenanigans. That's why it is not fully supported by any other software and trying to use alternative applications results in numerous compatibility issues.

So your best option is to use LibreOffice, because it is libre software, capable, available from several vendors, and is based on true open standard, OpenDocument.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#658

Post by teddyh »

silicon2401 wrote: post #506
thayne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can I use Open Office across OSes? I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both) And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.

What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them

LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#659

Post by vkou »

s17n wrote: post #567
vkou wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it responds to the entire[1] train of thought that follows that statement. Please re-read what I am saying, and consider it in context. You are suggesting that Google work on updating the standards to make their desired use case work better. I am suggesting that Google's desired use case will never be served by document-oriented standards, and that is why it shouldn't mess with those standards. Again, the w…

> Well, I don't respond to your point that Google Docs is intended to display documents That was the entire point

> as another commenter points out, it's incredibly obvious that its most important function is to edit documents.
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