[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