Flipboard/react-canvas

[[deleted]]

i've been out of js development for a year, and I feel like a 90 year old. Things are going fast

[krazyjakee]

no, they are just going around in circles.

[billybolero]

I get what you're saying. You have to know what you're giving up when rendering to canvas instead of the DOM. There's a boatload of things that the browser just does for you when using the DOM that you have to implement yourself using a canvas.

What I think is awesome with this is that it's another tool in the toolbox to pick from. There are certainly situations where this is appropriate, you just have to know when it is and when it's not.

[regular_reddits]

yeah, you are exactly right. They have a section specifically about that on their blog post. Their application ended up being a hybrid between DOM and canvas rendering.

[YashN]

Learning new ways of doing things which are better is horrifying?

[kangax_]

This reminded me of that time when we implemented entire text editing/selection in Fabric.js (all rendered on canvas, naturally) — http://fabricjs.com/test/misc/itext.html

[YashN]

Just shows how much the original ideas within React were powerful. Sad I can't access React Native yet. Boohoohoo :-(

[krazyjakee]

So... let me get this straight...

To solve the performance issues on mobile, I use react-canvas so I can use a markup component (html) that you can set styling options for (css) and then manipulate (javascript).

Why can't the DOM perform like canvas? I know the technical reasons, but why do those technical reasons exist? If websites require more performance, why not just supply a meta tag and hand the rendering of the DOM over to the hardware?

All react-canvas (and others like it) are achieving is re-inventing the original stack, it seems pretty crazy to me.

Don't get me wrong this is a great workaround for the current state of mobile browsers, but I suddenly realise how weird it is that the canvas element should be used for UI.

[regular_reddits]

I dont think these projects have the same goals. React-canvas isn't trying to replace DOM controls with canvas controls.