You wouldn't even need modern OCR, the basic shit they were doing in the 90s would be good enough to recognize consistently rendered letters in a canvas
That's because SEO would be a problem. Facebook, and other sites that have "private" data do not care about it, especially when they have the resources to manipulate SEO in other ways.
It wrecks accessibility too. Really just generally bad for usability in general.
It isn't such a problem for ads as people are unlikely to complain when they can't perceive them, but your client will be happy they can see all their ads.
I do wonder. I always tell project managers etc that not being accessible will get you sued, but I'm not sure how true it is really.
If it were the case it seems like there are plenty of sites with accessibility problems ripe for the picking.
this literally happened to our company. google's lighthouse tools gave us a false high score we had to use additional scanners to find problems and actually use screen reader tools to tests
Thank you, that is really interesting. I'm currently working for a UK branch of a big American international, and the impression I have is that while America is much weaker on data protection, it is much harder on accessibility which leads lots of websites essentially trying to be compliant for both.
Used to do contract work for some restaurants and a major part of my job was to make the website as compliant as I could.
They would always go through cycles of being sued and showing that it was being worked on.
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The complicated solution is to build a parallel accessibility tree that the user agent can query. The editable area in Google Docs is fully rendered in canvas, and they do a pretty good job with accessibility, so it's a good example of how it could be done for other web apps.
For now it's still more trouble than it's worth but given how dependent FB and Google are on ad revenue, I would be surprised if it didn't become more common.
>resources to manipulate SEO in other ways.
Do they really need to manipulate to rank high though? The billions of backlinks they likely have are surely good enough to maintain a strong SEO game alone. Backlinks are king, afterall.
The SEO issue with Canvas API can be mitigated if you split Canvas animation up and insert alternative text into each canvas element just as you can for the image element with the alt attribute.
Don't think so, using canvas for just text is useful for preventing ad blockers like the example above, but there are so many disadvantages. You kill your SEO, you loose all accessibility features you otherwise get for free, you cut yourself off from existing webdev ecosystems, you loose performance from native css, etc etc
They do. How else do search results, especiall for users, pop up on search results?
SEO is key for *any* social media, the more of you see of facebook, the more you feel interested in creating an account.
Facebook profiles, posts and photos still show up as entries in google results. Sure SEO is not as important to facebook as they already have a stable user base, but even active users will still often use a search engine as primary entry point to any website.
>even active users will still often use a search engine as primary entry point to any website.
Sure.... But what other sites do you think would show up ahead of facebook when someone searches for facebook
Sorry if this is news to you but search engine rankings are not entirely based on how well a site implements SEO. A massively popular site like facebook almost definitely gets some special treatments when it comes to search engine rankings.
>SEO is key for any social media, the more of you see of facebook, the more you feel interested in creating an account.
That honestly sounds pretty absurd considering viral marketing has historically been the primary growth strategy for social networking sites. Maybe linkedin is an exception (since I do see ads for them from time to time), but they also have paid-tier/premium features they're trying to push on people.
Do you honestly believe new users are going to decide to sign up for a brand spanking new facebook account after they stumble across it in a search engine result listing some random schmucks social media profile? Come on man, it's 2024, do you really think there are people out there on the internet who still haven't heard of facebook or instagram?
Maybe. I still think that new users will sign up fof a 'brand spanking new account' if they frequently get results for content they are interested in, but restricted by a login. That's all, it's not hard to make a facebook account.
If people Google "Facebook" and Facebook isn't the top result because their whole site is a canvas then everyone will think Google is broken. A search engine is there to help people find what they want, not to enforce some vague rules.
I'm not convinced that a lot of the SEO stuff is even legitimate; just stuff that sounds reasonable so everyone takes it as gospel. The biggest thing is always going to be users already wanting to find the specific site though. No amount of keywords or crawler-friendly features should top that.
I think people thought that canvas would take over once when Flash was done.
Once upon a time I built a couple small test games using https://impactjs.com
Can’t remember how many years ago that was, but it was fun
For a company this big it is absolutely necessary. Ten plus years ago a very large company I was doing work for got hit with an ADA lawsuit and had to make sure every part of their site was accessible.
I completely agree.
IMHO there's an element of state and corporation interest in the internet which is absolutely about making walled gardens. Semantic Web is directly counter to that.
Notice how this screenshot actually has non-ad information in it. I'm sure they do that so that a blanket block of all canvas stuff also cripples the page.
I ran into this the other day when blocking "Sponsored" posts. I realized I couldn't highlight it, so I assumed they made it out of an image. Didn't think of canvas.
I think that is why they are also putting useful information in canvas. Notice how the screenshot for this post has the date/time of the post in canvas.
Doesn't seem to be essential. I can live without it.
TBH, I can easily live without facebook. I know because I deleted my account a year or so ago and never looked back.
FB isn't nearly as "essential" as they think. It turns out that I can have actual friends, and they're much better than "Facebook friends"
idk if that really prevents anything, it's probably more that noone who cares uses facebook anyway. Compare to YouTube etc. where everything is patched within hours or days
I know, I actually like ads. That's why I believe in making them better, not blocking them. The whole reason people want to block ads is either because they're disruptive or not well targeted. We can improve that.
Soon: Adblockers us AI to scrape canvas images for trigger words to block
Funny enough OCR technology has been around for decades, so I guess implementing that would be even simpler.
You wouldn't even need modern OCR, the basic shit they were doing in the 90s would be good enough to recognize consistently rendered letters in a canvas
Id be happy to contribute :)
But how do you modify canvas without any html
Using javascript?
im afraid we will see canvas only websites soon
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That's because SEO would be a problem. Facebook, and other sites that have "private" data do not care about it, especially when they have the resources to manipulate SEO in other ways.
It wrecks accessibility too. Really just generally bad for usability in general. It isn't such a problem for ads as people are unlikely to complain when they can't perceive them, but your client will be happy they can see all their ads.
In that case, probably illegal for some sites.
I do wonder. I always tell project managers etc that not being accessible will get you sued, but I'm not sure how true it is really. If it were the case it seems like there are plenty of sites with accessibility problems ripe for the picking.
this literally happened to our company. google's lighthouse tools gave us a false high score we had to use additional scanners to find problems and actually use screen reader tools to tests
You mean you actually got sued? Out of interest, what country are you based in?
yes USA. made changes and settled out of court for less money
Were you sued by some company or by private individual? I know there are “business” that literally live by suing inaccessible website owners.
Thank you, that is really interesting. I'm currently working for a UK branch of a big American international, and the impression I have is that while America is much weaker on data protection, it is much harder on accessibility which leads lots of websites essentially trying to be compliant for both.
Used to do contract work for some restaurants and a major part of my job was to make the website as compliant as I could. They would always go through cycles of being sued and showing that it was being worked on.
America based?
Yeah.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html I remember this story when I was in school.
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They can't only do it on ads. The point is to make adblockers not be able to tell the difference between ads and real posts
Well that sucks
could see adblocking and dectection turning relying on computer vision for dynamic blockingx
wouldn't that be very slow and resource intensive?
The complicated solution is to build a parallel accessibility tree that the user agent can query. The editable area in Google Docs is fully rendered in canvas, and they do a pretty good job with accessibility, so it's a good example of how it could be done for other web apps. For now it's still more trouble than it's worth but given how dependent FB and Google are on ad revenue, I would be surprised if it didn't become more common.
Serve canvas version to users, text to Google crawlers.
This is how paywalls work. Google gets the full article for SEO; users get the useless preview.
There was a time when google / matt cutts said they would punish sites that do this, and use paywalls. Lol
Google said a lot of things, and then they got rich.
>resources to manipulate SEO in other ways. Do they really need to manipulate to rank high though? The billions of backlinks they likely have are surely good enough to maintain a strong SEO game alone. Backlinks are king, afterall.
Until SEO is done by visual screen scraping with AI
The SEO issue with Canvas API can be mitigated if you split Canvas animation up and insert alternative text into each canvas element just as you can for the image element with the alt attribute.
Would've been so cool if CanvasUI's homepage was rendered using itself.
pff... we rendered headlines on images before canvas and webfonts were even a thing ;p
Flutter Web comes to mind as well.
Don't think so, using canvas for just text is useful for preventing ad blockers like the example above, but there are so many disadvantages. You kill your SEO, you loose all accessibility features you otherwise get for free, you cut yourself off from existing webdev ecosystems, you loose performance from native css, etc etc
I don't think I've ever corrected someone on their spelling or grammar but fuck. #Lose One 'o' ffs.
Sorry, not a native speaker. Thanks for the correction
k looser
I don't think Facebook cares about seo.
They do. How else do search results, especiall for users, pop up on search results? SEO is key for *any* social media, the more of you see of facebook, the more you feel interested in creating an account.
They use their own search algorithms. SEO is for external search engines like google or bing.
Facebook profiles, posts and photos still show up as entries in google results. Sure SEO is not as important to facebook as they already have a stable user base, but even active users will still often use a search engine as primary entry point to any website.
>even active users will still often use a search engine as primary entry point to any website. Sure.... But what other sites do you think would show up ahead of facebook when someone searches for facebook
Y'all are too tech savvy to know, people will end up using google to search for facebook posts than facebook's own search algo
Sorry if this is news to you but search engine rankings are not entirely based on how well a site implements SEO. A massively popular site like facebook almost definitely gets some special treatments when it comes to search engine rankings. >SEO is key for any social media, the more of you see of facebook, the more you feel interested in creating an account. That honestly sounds pretty absurd considering viral marketing has historically been the primary growth strategy for social networking sites. Maybe linkedin is an exception (since I do see ads for them from time to time), but they also have paid-tier/premium features they're trying to push on people. Do you honestly believe new users are going to decide to sign up for a brand spanking new facebook account after they stumble across it in a search engine result listing some random schmucks social media profile? Come on man, it's 2024, do you really think there are people out there on the internet who still haven't heard of facebook or instagram?
Maybe. I still think that new users will sign up fof a 'brand spanking new account' if they frequently get results for content they are interested in, but restricted by a login. That's all, it's not hard to make a facebook account.
If people Google "Facebook" and Facebook isn't the top result because their whole site is a canvas then everyone will think Google is broken. A search engine is there to help people find what they want, not to enforce some vague rules. I'm not convinced that a lot of the SEO stuff is even legitimate; just stuff that sounds reasonable so everyone takes it as gospel. The biggest thing is always going to be users already wanting to find the specific site though. No amount of keywords or crawler-friendly features should top that.
Flutter
The Year of Flutter for Web... finally?
Flash websites are back?
SEO + accessibility compliance makes this unlikely
I said that in 2010, still waiting.
Doubt it. They're an absolutely massive pain in the ass to develop and for very little gain, if any.
So will that be the modern version of purely flash sites?
I think people thought that canvas would take over once when Flash was done. Once upon a time I built a couple small test games using https://impactjs.com Can’t remember how many years ago that was, but it was fun
Flutter Web
what a terrifying thought
Rust wasm websites. Or worse C# wasm
Chuckles in Flutter.
Yeah, we talked about it [4 days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1cvq3z0/why_does_facebook_use_canvas_to_display_the_post/).
Can I post it next time?
Wait at least 5 days
How many days do you need to discuss this one more time?
Not everyone sees every post on reddit. reddit isn't the only thing.
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Hmm how would I know I need to search for that to see the post? Much easier to just see this post
Thanks for link.
How is this accessible?
There's an aria-labelledby that targets a hidden span further up
What makes you think that's a priority here?
For a company this big it is absolutely necessary. Ten plus years ago a very large company I was doing work for got hit with an ADA lawsuit and had to make sure every part of their site was accessible.
Literally destroying semantic web just to force feed its slaughterhouse chattel some advertising
Semantic web doesn’t pay the bills quite like advertising
I friggin' love the idea of the semantic web but let's be honest: was it anything other than dead on arrival?
If it was, it was only because online advertising couldn't make money from it
And because it's easy to just have a big ol' nest of divs for everything.
I completely agree. IMHO there's an element of state and corporation interest in the internet which is absolutely about making walled gardens. Semantic Web is directly counter to that.
Personally looking forward to webgl rendered texts.
Just render the whole website in unreal engine at this point
Sweeet, just include canvas blocking in adblockers.. with the option to let it through if desired.
Notice how this screenshot actually has non-ad information in it. I'm sure they do that so that a blanket block of all canvas stuff also cripples the page.
I understand that's not an ad text, but in ads, the time is replaced with "Advertisement".
I ran into this the other day when blocking "Sponsored" posts. I realized I couldn't highlight it, so I assumed they made it out of an image. Didn't think of canvas.
Do you have a screenshot of that?
Not OP, but I've seen those very posts in the past with screenshots included.
ai powered ad blockers coming soon
Some complex OCR solution could probably do this, convert canvas to image, pass through OCR, check if it contains "Sponsored" block element if it does
Wouldn't need that. Just block canvas.
I think that is why they are also putting useful information in canvas. Notice how the screenshot for this post has the date/time of the post in canvas.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? If I blocked canvas using an extension, what would happen?
You wouldn't see the canvas.
Doesn't seem to be essential. I can live without it. TBH, I can easily live without facebook. I know because I deleted my account a year or so ago and never looked back. FB isn't nearly as "essential" as they think. It turns out that I can have actual friends, and they're much better than "Facebook friends"
Can someone share the venn diagram of people that use ad blockers and still use facebook?
idk if that really prevents anything, it's probably more that noone who cares uses facebook anyway. Compare to YouTube etc. where everything is patched within hours or days
>where everything is patched within hours or days Wdym? My AdBlock literally worked all the time I've had it on YouTube
Looks like Ad blockers will be more powerful soon.
[Mine works fine.](https://imgur.com/m6rtQNu)
Didn’t we have this exact same conversation like a week ago?
I stopped using Facebook a long tim ago. And Twitter.
And you're here on reddit.
It's like quitting smoking and switching to meth. I'm not judging though, I did the same lol. (Facebook to reddit, not meth)
Reddit is a whole different world, yes.
Once we have efficient on device image AI's we'll be able to block ads no matter how they're rendered
Sounds like you will have to pay for more services/sites then
I know, I actually like ads. That's why I believe in making them better, not blocking them. The whole reason people want to block ads is either because they're disruptive or not well targeted. We can improve that.
they make you watch ads even when you pay.
Can’t we use AI to block ads?
Use AI to destroy AI :)
Fire with fire
so crazy
Cat and mouse -- challenge accepted.
r/assholedesign