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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.

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> 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.

I might try that for my next game.