People are trying to make DOM be a WYSWIG text editor. You're point is dead on.

The response is to write an opaque, vendor-specific "DOM". Which is the complete opposite of what HTML was supposed to be. But the browser is now a platform and not a browser, so the metaphors are horribly mixed to the point where I'm not even sure what a DOM is supposed to be anymore.

The DOM was always a WYSIWYG editor – albeit, for HTML, not text. Though, back in the day, HTML was a subset of text with image and table support; none of this fancy `line-height: 1.5em;`…

I wish the web had evolved in a more documenty way.

Hmmm... maybe I should have chosen a different acronym.

What you expected to see isn't alwasy what you got.

WYETSIAWYG

Rendering across browsers and operating systems was a trainwreck until maybe 5 years ago (over a decade of polyfill is finally gone). And even with an ecosystem like ElectronJS + Bootstrap, Win10 MacOS and Linux all look slightly different.

So yes and no to "DOM was always...", but more "No."

> We just need to stop making it do things it wasn't supposed to

This is a thread about Google Docs. Your suggestion to the Docs team is to ... stop? Just shut down their product?

Just send LibreOffice files as attachments via your personal email server, what’s the problem?

/s

Well, to be fair Libre Office online exists[0]. However, I believe EtherCalc[1] is faster.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

[1] https://ethercalc.net/

I read this as sometimes you need to use an exit hatch like Canvas instead of a bunch of hacks to make a WYSIWYG editor strictly with the DOM. Google seemed to come to the same realization and that is why they are using Canvas

Oh no. They're google. They make a godforsaken browser. They can pay people to do nothing more than think about code. By all means. They can launch a satellite with css if they want.

But the rest of us plebs...

Btw for NASA css is shorthand for Control Stick Steering, which is something you did at later stages of landing with a space shuttle.

Yes? Most of the web really ought to be shut down. It's just providing negative utility to society.

Alternatively: return to monke.

I'd agree. I think the DOM is fantastic, *unless* you are doing advanced document manipulation, in which case it is trash (for that use case only). This is what I'm assuming the author meant.

I spent many years working on that sort of thing, a decade ago.

The problem is that the escape hatch from document to application is completely broken. The DOM is fine for documents, but it's completely awful for applications. Admittedly, some things on the web that should be documents insist on being applications instead, but many things on the web aren't documents.

For these things, using the DOM is painful. When the pain becomes great enough, the biggest available escape hatch is pure native 2D rendering (canvas), which is a nightmare for accessibility and affordance to end-users. It would be awesome to have something else to escape to.

Isn't Electron rendering to an embedded Chromium and therefore the DOM as well?

Yes

That's the entire point. DOM is meant for structured web pages, not web apps. If you want to build complex web apps it is better to use your own renderer..which is exactly what Google is doing with Docs.

We should just port wine to webassembly and be done with it