| Lots of reasons. Font rendering for all of unicode is extremely hard. https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ Multi-language input is extremely hard https://lord.io/blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/ Having to download an extra meg or 10 of code does not make your website responsive to start, worse if you're updating it constantly so you're users have to re-download that code every few days, hours. Support for assistive technologies disappears. A page of HTML is relatively easy to scan for text to read or turn to brail or translate to another language. A screen (not a page) of pixels is not. Similarly extensions all break. Extensions work because there is a known structure to the page (HTML) UI consistency disappears. Of course pages already have this issue but it will be much much worse if every site rolls it's own pixel rendering GUI because none of the standard keys will work. Ctrl/Cmd-Z for undo Ctrl/Cmd-A for select all? Similarly maybe the user has changed those keys or is using some other assistive device which all works because things are standardized. Letting the browser handle what's best for the device probably disappears. Cleartype for fonts? Rendering Text or SVG at the user's resolution (yes that can be handled by the page but will it? up to the site) Password managers break including the browser's built in one. There's no text field to find so no way to know if this is the place to fill them in. Spell checking breaks. Same as above. Basically your site will suck for users if you do this. Some will say some frameworks will come up that try to solve all of these issues but that will just mean every pages is on a different version of the framework with different bugs not yet resolved. Sounds like hell. |
But don't you think there's a whole lot of apps that could benefit from being on a canvas rather than being slowed down by browser-stuff? Editors come to mind: CodeSandbox and VScode