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by masklinn 4570 days ago
> much less complicated for such applications.

I'm uncertain that having to reimplement all your high-level drawing routines by hand and figuring out how to handle responsive and reimplementing all activation and behaviors on top of that is less complicated than just using what the DOM provides.

Even text wrapping must be done by hand when you're using canvas.
1 comments
cia_plant 4570 days ago
I've written text wrapping and responsiveness code for canvas, in javascript - I don't think the complexity is even of the same order of magnitude as React or Angular.
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chongli 4570 days ago
What about line height? Judging by some of the responses I've seen on Stackoverflow, calculating this involves running a loop and querying the pixel colours from the canvas's buffer; a very ugly hack, if you ask me!
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cia_plant 4570 days ago
line height is straightforward enough, if you draw text with line height on N then you should move N pixels down for the next line.

Text baseline is the tricky part - if you want to e.g. put a taller piece of text next to a shorter one, then they should be put together so they share a baseline, but there's no decent way to get the text baseline.

The hack I use is to draw the text in a hidden span, and put a 1px inline-block span next to it, and check where the 1px span ends up. This works though it is ugly.

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X4 4570 days ago
Why don't you precompute the space things use, including the text that is drawn using a matrix? You could easily calculate the baseline of anything by just doing matrix multiplications then.

However, I think you would still end up using a hack. The general idea of creating a replacement for the DOM has bugged me for a while too. It is a great to replace the DOM completely by a statemachine, I think. We need a New Document Model that supports "Batch Operations", is "Stateful" and uses the latest best performing algorithms published to do so.

Components are the CORRECT way, I fully agree with the facebook team here.

It seems that there is one guy who ALREADY DID all those things and replaced the DOM by something that's more akin to 2013's technology requirements. Link: http://www.nidium.com/

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eliseumds 4564 days ago
This comparison makes no sense at all.
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