I wish you best of luck. I understand your decision to go with canvas. I have experimented with canvas quite a bit as well, as I could not get HTML DOM performance quite right initially.

How I solved this for DataGridXL:

Only columns are DOM nodes. Rows are not actually nodes, but values are spaced vertically using CSS and with a simple newline (\n) character in between. The grid lines are just that: they're grid lines that are repositioned using CSS animation when the user is scrolling.

This means that when a user is scrolling, the DOM does not have to update by, let's say 20 rows x 10 columns = 200 DOM nodes. Only 10 column DOM nodes need to be redrawn.

That's how DGXL works with DOM & HTML but is still in many cases faster than a canvas implementation. Plus it still is accessible. Try zooming the page or use CTRL+F. You can find and select any (visible) value inside the data grid. No problems there.