The Future Web: Will Canvas Rendering Replace the DOM?

Google Docs leads the way to an app-focused future

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing recently about Google’s decision to use the HTML <canvas> for all of its rendering in Google Docs. And the concern is understandable. Once upon a time the web was supposed to be system for sharing carefully structured information, full of sensible metadata and collaboration. Instead, we turned it into an semi-opaque app delivery model running in a browser sandbox.

Google’s decision — to switch from writing HTML elements on a page to painting pixels on a canvas — isn’t anything developers haven’t seen before. Other leading-edge web apps already reach far beyond the traditional confines of HTML elements. Google Maps has been rendering on the canvas for years. VS Code uses it to draw a pixel-perfect terminal. And then there’s Google’s emerging Flutter toolkit, which lets you build a cross-platform UI that renders through the canvas by default in a web browser.

But somehow, this time feels different. There’s a sense that canvas rendering, combined with other developments like WebAssembly, have taken us past a tipping point. It now feels like the familiar pattern — downloading plaintext JavaScript code and executing it against an inspectable HTML document — might just be a brief stop in…