4 ms·

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.

• swyx 5y ago
  so the bigger story is... is Google Docs switching to Flutter Web? is that what's going on here?
  • neurostimulant 5y ago
    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.