A common concern as web apps implement technologies that are less user-readable (and user-alterable) than traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is that the web platform becomes less open. There are certainly examples of that: Facebook obfuscates its webpage code to stymie client-side ad blocking; websites have so much JavaScript, much of it related to ads and tracking, that it is common to minify (compress) web code to hit load time targets; proposals like Google s Web Bundles have been criticized as anti-web; and WebAssembly bytecode, while it may be fast, isn t easy to decipher.
Newman, however, doesn t see Canvas-based rendering having much to do with source readability. The trend toward less easily viewed source code is real, he said, but it seems orthogonal to Canvas versus DOM.