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It is an interesting possibility. Obviously people wouldn't want it to hurt their SEO (for public facing websites). However Google is okay with displaying a dif

It is an interesting possibility. Obviously people wouldn't want it to hurt their SEO (for public facing websites). However Google is okay with displaying a different page to their Googlebot (for example if you have a SPA it is okay to prerender it and display that as long as the content it the same). So if your HTML based content is the same as your canvas based content maybe Google would be fine with it and you could get both good SEO and an ad-blocker-free experience...

jerf 5y ago
That's a good point. It's not clear how to square the circle of making your content sufficiently accessible that it can be indexed by Google properly, but ad blockers can't get a grip on it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not clear. Any website that wants to go to 100% pure WASM canvas code is going to have serious problems with getting indexed properly. Anything they do to scramble ad blockers will scramble the indexing as well. It makes sense for google docs because the contents of the documents shouldn't be indexed (mostly). And of course there's the special case here of Google having both the document and the web engine so they'll always be able to index the public documents, even if nobody else can. (I'll pencil in the antitrust hearings for this for 2027 or so.)