[davidy123]

AFAIK (and in evidence in this case) you can't use the normal "find in page" (control-f) when using canvas. Consistency in functions like find is one of the greatest things about the browser, this approach removes it. Probably (!) an implementation will add its own find, which may be better or worse, but as browsers are best thought of as universal information vehicles, it won't automatically fit into accessibility and extension schemes.

[codetrotter]

You'll basically have to reimplement Ctrl+F yourself regardless of whether you are using canvas or not because if you have say a spreadsheet with fifteen thousand columns and fourty million rows of data then I doubt any browser would be able to handle having all of those elements in the DOM at once. So I don't think that is a compelling argument against canvas.

[davidy123]

That's true, but I hope people would hesitate before using this for spreadsheets that don't require virtual rendering.

[c0brac0bra]

Good luck finding a full-featured browser grid product that doesn't do virtual rendering. They all have to, even Google Sheets.

[swiley]

I remember in a little personal experiment I did you could just set content-editable:true on a table and then add a couple buttons with some js to do things like add rows etc. and you got a decent mini spreadsheet-like UI. Formulas wouldn't work without something special obviously but I remember being surprised with how much was implemented in the browser.

One very neat thing about this approach is that read-only access works without javascript

[tlrobinson]

Generally I agree, however even some DOM-based implementations of spreadsheets (and similar applications with very long lists of things) break "find in page" due to them only rendering visible cells for performance reasons.

For example, Google Sheets hijacks command/control-F to show their own search for this reason.

[woogley]

Also because Google Sheets is a canvas implementation, not DOM

[lucideer]

Google Sheets is a combo. The sheet display is canvas, but a lot of interaction is DOM (and—notably—all text is initially stored in DOM, but then paged out for perf reasons as the above commenter mentions).

That said, X-Spreadsheet does also use DOM for some text interactions at least—seemingly much less so than Google from what I can initially/briefly see though.