I found this thread kind of hard to follow because I'm not familiar with the details of how a page renders but it seems that everything suggested its kind of complicated and a pain to work with.
What if we had an API that could just provide us with the contents of a div as a bitmap, and we replace the complex dom with a single canvas and do our own rendering while doing these smooth 60fps animations. When done we hide the canvas and show the real DOM again.
Err, I guess thats what those other guys are doing that we read about last week.
> What if we had an API that could just provide us with the contents of a div as a bitmap
Can't do that for security reasons: it would open the CSS :visited info leak. Pages could determine which other pages you've visited by inspecting the colors of visited links.
woah, crazy edge case. I guess you could render the page without the :visited style.
Thinking about it more though since I posted. I don't think anybody would use it the way I described, I think people would simply end up rendering everything to bitmaps, and manage their own layout and animation in the canvas.
What if we had an API that could just provide us with the contents of a div as a bitmap, and we replace the complex dom with a single canvas and do our own rendering while doing these smooth 60fps animations. When done we hide the canvas and show the real DOM again.
Err, I guess thats what those other guys are doing that we read about last week.