> Google's decision here reflects the belief that, despite this, the Web is not suited for documents. I don’t see how you jumped to that conclusion. They’re no

> Google's decision here reflects the belief that, despite this, the Web is not suited for documents. I don’t see how you jumped to that conclusion. They’re not changing the way documents are stored, they’re only changing how documents are rendered. Who’s relying on the render API? What functionality do you think you’re losing, as a web user? The web of HTML+CSS is good for some kinds of documents - static documents, but it has never been good at editing documents, and it has never been good at all documents, and it has never been the best platform for high performance applications like editors or games. > this is just shy of an abrogation of their responsibility to act as a steward for the Web and the intention that it best serve users Ignoring the problems with your assumption that Google should act as a steward for today’s Web (Google’s mission statement doesn’t mention preserving HTML. And it’s better if public, not private for-profit entities are our stewards) -- this decision is being made to best serve users, no? As a user, I want Docs to render faster, don’t you? I’m not quite seeing your reasoning why this affects the long term health of the Web. I can’t help but note that many large web apps have transitioned to canvas rendering for performance, and the internet is still growing. There is, in fact, a problem with rendering HTML+CSS in a performant way when editing things, and it might be too late, and there might be too much legacy to fix it... maybe. It’s still pretty good at what it does, and not likely to go away.