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Comment by sunnybeetroot | Hacker News Reader

Please read TFA

> for most web apps, you’re much better off with good old DOM elements. Take the humble <input type="text"> element, for example. With it, you get crispy rendering at any resolution, support for tab, focus, selection, mouse interactions and arrow key navigation, internationalization for right-to-left text and Asian compound characters, accessibility for screen readers…

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I did read the article. It is not a balanced piece. The title is “You might want to build your webapp in canvas instead”. Almost the entire article - basically everything except for that paragraph - is talking about canvas rendering. About when and why it might be better. There is nowhere near enough discussion of the downsides. If you read this article you could walk away thinking Google docs is implemented entirely on top of the canvas API. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are a lot of comments in this thread excited by the idea of turning my web browser into a dumb frame buffer for someone’s home grown, laggy, half baked UI framework that cannot function on par with the DOM for hard technical reasons. I don't want to run software like that.

The author is not obligated to lay down every single pro and con for something, it's just a blog post with some examples and if the reader wants, they can research more into the topic themselves.

I just don’t want to log in to my banking portal in 3 months to find the whole thing has been rewritten on top of canvas for no reason.

Just because people use a technology incorrectly does not make the technology bad, especially when people like the author explicitly state where it does and does not make sense.

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