[CursedUrn]

This seems like something that would be heavily abused by sites that deliberately try to break basic browser functionality (like being able to right click images, or select text). If they render the whole page as a background image, you'll no longer be able to inspect, save, translate, etc. any of the content. That's just the first thing I thought of, I imagine there's all sorts of nefarious ways to screw over the reader with this function.

[cal85]

I agree it feels like something that could be abused, but not with the example you've given. It already only takes a tiny bit of CSS or JS to do those things you mentioned; no need to do anything complex with element canvases. So the reason that most websites don't do those things cannot be that they don't have the ability. It is because they do not, in fact, have the inclination, and that's because there is an economic punishment for having a shitty website: people will start using your competitors instead. (Caveat: this doesn't work out in areas that aren't free markets, like company intranet portals, badly run local council sites etc, which is why those kinds of sites tend to have more user-hostile stuff.) In general it is a mistake to think that we need to purposefully hamstring website operators to make the standard of websites higher: the opposite is true.

[cubefox]

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36749766