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Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

Until people try building a desktop class application using te DOM, I think it's probably best for them to reserve judgement. Cappuccino and Sproutcore are the only ones who did it well (maybe Ext, but I don't know the API well enough), unfortunately it always lead to a leaky abstraction (I say that as core team member for Cappuccino). Then web developers come in and want to use their jQuery widgets, and are confused why it's terrible. The canvas approach is an almost pure abstraction, and should be explored thoroughly.

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Right. I'm not saying it's perfect, just that it's an option worth exploring. HTML and CSS simply weren't designed for applications. They're great for documents, but it turns out that using them for this style of application ends up causing a lot of trouble later on as the applications get more complex. Abstractions can help with this, and once it is abstracted, it shouldn't really matter what the rendering backend is. Could be DOM or canvas in the browser, and as this project is showing, various native backends as well. I think that's really powerful.

When we identify places that HTML/CSS are falling short for making desktop quality applications, and we bring those issues to the standards community, and we make HTML/CSS better, then we lift up everybody's applications. We make the whole web better. Together.

If we can get missing UI features into the browser, those UI features will have native implementations and APIs, and that will give all of us free functionality and better performance.

Yup, and canvas is just a part of that. It gives control back to the web developers and allows us to create anything we want without waiting for browser implementations. IMO, HTML and CSS are fundamentally not designed for building this kind of app, which isn't really a solvable problem without inventing something new anyway. Either that or we abstract them to make working with them easier.

Can you give an example of how Google Documents is falling short of being desktop class with their HTML/CSS based UI?

It's all GWT. The abstraction works there because you can't touch the DOM.

Seriously? Google Docs is nothing compared to any native word processor. Just look at Apple Pages or Microsoft Word. The kinds of layouts and power you get from those tools is way beyond what anyone has ever been able to do in the browser.

Secondly, yes Google Docs uses HTML for their UI, but it's seriously abstracted I believe as Google Closure though I may be wrong. My point is that HTML and CSS can still be used, but they need abstractions for this type of app. Canvas is just another approach to the same problem.

Do you have links so I can check out some web based word processors that deliver more of a desktop class experience than Google Docs does? Especially one where the UI is done entirely with Canvas?

As far as I know, no one has built that yet. But just because canvas allows a greater degree of flexibility, I think it's a worthy experiment for someone to do.

CappCon had couple awesome demos using all canvas. Example is here: https://github.com/austinsarner/Frappuccino unfortunately it's pretty buggy since it was never finished (due to a lack of funding) I believe a video of it being used was shown in the single video of the talk we released, it can be found on the Cappuccino blog.

Edit: here's a link to a video from very early on in development. http://db.tt/2YX8gpYx

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