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

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#951

Post by RenePardo » Wed, May 19, 2021, 12:37 AM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #287

There is a demo doc on their site, and it breaks the X11 primary selection.

On the topic of spreadsheets:

Rich Harris has it right. LANPAR is in fact the world's first electronic spreadsheet. The inventors/creators also invented implementing Forward Referencing - the cornerstone of spreadsheets. This was in 1969, ten years before Visicac and 14 years before Lotus 1-2-3. LANPAR was used extensively for Plant Budgeting operations across every telephone company in North America throughout the early 70's.

VisiCalc, SuperCalc and TKSolver did not have Forward referencing. You had to manually refresh the screen (recalculate the entire spreadsheet) and watch to see when cells stopped changing values (if they needed results from cells further in the spreadsheet (left to right, top to bottom).

Lotus 1-2-3 did have Forward Referencing. Multiplan I, did not and accordingly could not hurt Lotus until MultiPlan II incorporated it.

I had communications from magazine editor(s) who simply had not been aware of LANPAR because it was so far ahead of its time, and 10 years later VisiCalc implemented its spreadsheet on Apple's microcomputer - popularizing spreadsheets at a consumer level. So Yes, Rich Harris got it totally 100% right!!

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#952

Post by jd3 » Fri, May 21, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

jd3 wrote: post #669

dangoor wrote: post #563

In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time. Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to D…

It's funny — Google's approach here reminds me of the Netscape/Mozilla XUL tree[0] element. For those unfamiliar, the XUL tree is a performant 1990s-era virtualized list that is able to render millions to tens of millions of rows of content without slowdown since it gives you the option of rendering internally in Firefox rather than through the DOM. I still don't completely understand why Mozilla is/was planning to a…

for future readers — ironically, there were actually WIP patches to re-implement the XUL tree (nsITreeView) using an HTML5 canvas years ago

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441414#c172

---

  "What has been will be again,
  what has been done will be done again;
  there is nothing new under the sun."

—Ecclesiastes 1:9

"pining for a future that never arrived"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher#Hauntology

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#953

Post by ec109685 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #899

snewman wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distribution. It is so, so, so much harder to get most users to install an app, especially for casual purposes ("please add your notes to this doc") which is often how people first come to Docs.

That's a common belief but there are a lot of exceptions that mean we should question how true this really is. 1. Mobile-first, mobile-only apps. 2. Minecraft or really any game. 3. The proliferation of Electron apps that are basically downloadable versions of the website. 4. Apple's own suite of apps. Keynote is pretty darn popular. In the case of a user who is really, really unmotivated to comment on a doc, sure. T…

On the other hand, allowing for a native desktop app could have caused it to end up in the same state as Microsoft's apps on the web (e.g. the web version of PowerPoint is pretty awful), which would have undermined a key differentiator between Docs and Microsoft's suite.

I am not sure what has held gSuite back all these years, but the pandemic seems to have brought them out of their slumber.