[dgb23]

You’re hinting at something interesting there. As someone who‘s in web professionally but has been programming games as a hobby, I have only naive insight into the latter.

But from that superficial understanding I assume it has to do with control:

In a game you control the rendering/layout logic more specifically. Not every element has to follow all the rules, they need to follow certain rules, scoped to their use case.

With CSS we only have high level control _and_ a predefined data structure that may or may not make sense for specific cases (DOM tree), so each rendering node has to respect _all_ the features, plus _all_ these dependencies are propagated across the whole tree, whether it makes sense or not for a given use case.

If we had more generic, less abstract control, we would not have the same problems. Maybe there is merit in exposing more control to web developers.

[johangavle]

Just guessing here but perhaps they are adhering to some spec about how DOM should work and behave that is as old as the web itself :) HTML standards, JS standards, CSS standards all move forward, perhaps we need a DOM 2.0. Or a new browser that rethinks how it handles DOM to shake things up

[Gigachad]

Google docs decided to just turn the page in to a big <canvas> and render everything manually.

[robbiejs]

That works because Google Docs is a full-screen app. You can't really use Canvas-rendered tables inside a regular web page: it doesn't scale, for one.

I have made a super fast spreadsheet-like component called DataGridXL, based on DOM, not canvas. A performant One Million Cells demo can be found here: https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/one-million-cells

[johangavle]

Yeah they sure have the resources available to pull such things off. But for the rest of us I dont think it is a way forward at the moment. You really start from scratch and how do you fix accessibility and such. Must have required huge effort on their part