#Google doc s code

As Matthew MacDonald put it in an excellent article on the Young Coder blog: What makes this intriguing is that the Google Docs shift to canvas rendering may be an early sign of a bigger change in how web applications are built. The appeal of Canvas is that it enables the developers of Google Docs to bypass all of that persnickety DOM wrangling and just “paint” the document onto the page. However, an online word processor requires a lot of precise rendering of objects on a page, which is difficult to do via the DOM.

#Google doc s code

Up till now, Google Docs had evolved over the past fifteen years in the familiar pattern of most web applications: its interactivity largely achieved by heavy use of JavaScript code to manipulate the DOM. The bigger question, though, is what - if any - impact this change will have on how other web applications are built? Since Google is such a force in modern web development (Chrome being the dominant browser on the web), some are wondering if this shift to Canvas sets a bad precedent.

Google says the change to Canvas rendering will “improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.” It has immediate implications for developers of Chrome extensions, however, Google has given guidance on how extensions can be ported to the new framework. Previously he founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and built it into one of the world’s most influential technology news and analysis sites.

Richard is senior editor at The New Stack and writes a weekly column about web and application development trends.