The future of the web is weirdly human

The most interesting thing I’ve seen on the web this year isn’t an AI product. It’s a browser feature, and the future that it might represent.

Recently, Chrome began experimenting with something called HTML-in-canvas. At first glance, it looks like a fairly niche technical proposal. The browser takes ordinary HTML content and allows it to be rendered inside rich canvas environments whilst retaining all of the things that make HTML useful in the first place. The content remains part of the DOM. The browser still understands it. Accessibility tools still understand it. Search engines still understand it.

The demos are worth watching.

HTML just went 3D.

WICG’s HTML in Canvas lets you drop native DOM elements directly into WebGL and WebGPU scenes.

The flat web is getting a lot more interesting.

The nascent HTML-in-Canvas API is exciting to me not for flashy effects, but because it extends the semantics that the DOM can (tractably) represent — tiny example: it’s possible to show an element in multiple places, cheaply, under arbitrary transforms.

HTML can’t run Doom

But HTML can now run inside Doom! Thanks to HTML-in-Canvas!

Fully accessible DOM elements drawn into Doom’s own wall textures. This demo uses a WebAssembly port (jacobenget/doom.wasm) of the original C source.

HTML-in-canvas is now a first-class primitive in Remotion!

It enables new types of effects that were impossible before.

My take on the HTML-in-Canvas API that’s been trending lately.

Fetched pages from a website and took them into another dimension.

The parallax syncs with your head movement.

Built with Threejs and Mediapipe

HTML in Canvas + fragment shader.

Shader is applied to the actual interactive html.

html-in-canvas can’t ship fast enough

Card transition experiment with React Three Fiber + html-in-canvas.

Try it here: https://t.co/eEV2YTnRxd

Needs Chrome Canary for the interactive cards.

HTML-in-Canvas will open a door for innovation on the web

Create UIs and user experiences that are more engaging and sensible than ever before

Very straightforward and accessible

Extremely normal interfaces!

What’s striking about these examples isn’t the visual spectacle. We’ve had visually spectacular websites before. Nor is it the fact that content can exist in three-dimensional space. We’ve been building 3D experiences on the web for decades.

What feels different is that none of the usual compromises appear to apply.

Historically, richer experiences tended to come at a cost. The more expressive an interface became, the further it drifted from the native capabilities of the web. Search became harder. Accessibility became harder. Browser functionality became harder. Developers found themselves rebuilding things that browsers already knew how to do.

The demos hint at a future where that trade-off begins to disappear.

And once I’d started thinking about that, I found myself asking a much bigger question.

Why do websites look the way they do?

Why do they almost all share the same fundamental shape?

Why are websites for museums, communities, universities, dentists and product catalogues all made of pages?

Why are most websites made of pages connected by navigation, arranged into hierarchies, organised into sections and consumed through vertical scrolling?

The answer is that, for much of the web’s history, the document sat at the intersection of a huge number of competing requirements. Search engines could crawl it. Browsers could render it. Accessibility tools could interpret it. Content management systems could generate it. Businesses could manage it. Analytics platforms could measure it.

The document wasn’t necessarily the best representation of every idea, every place, every product or every experience. It was simply the format that everybody could agree on. And over time, that compromise became invisible.

The web didn’t merely adopt documents as a publishing format. It gradually began to think in documents.

I’ve written before about the URL-shaped web and the tendency for technologies to shape the information they contain. We became so successful at publishing, measuring, ranking and optimising documents that we eventually stopped noticing that we were making a choice.

The page won because it was practical. And over time, the advantages of the document-shaped web overwhelmed almost everything else.

We flirted with alternatives. Flash, for a while, promised a web built around experiences rather than documents. But those experiences were difficult to crawl, difficult to measure, difficult to integrate and difficult to standardise. Search engines, accessibility requirements and the broader web ecosystem gradually pulled everything back towards HTML and pages. The document didn’t win because it was the most expressive format. It won because it was the most compatible.

But now, we may wish to re-evaluate those constraints, assumptions, and advantages.

Enter AI

For most of the web’s history, the human-facing experience and the machine-readable representation were effectively the same thing. Increasingly, this needn’t be the case.

One of the more interesting things happening right now is the gradual separation of information from presentation. Search engines increasingly consume structured representations of content. Applications consume APIs. AI systems are starting to consume entities, relationships, feeds, product data and all manner of machine-oriented representations that were never intended for human eyes.

There’s a lot of debate around what the best architecture for this new age looks like – but whether it’s llms.txt, markdown files, or something else entirely, isn’t the interesting thing.

What’s interesting is that the web is becoming comfortable with the idea that different types of audiences might consume different representations of the same underlying information.

And the better that machines become at understanding meaning directly, the less pressure there is for human experiences to remain constrained by the formats that machines once required.

What if a website wasn’t a document?

The future of the web will likely become more semantic, more structured, and more machine-readable than ever before.

But HTML-in-canvas may allow it to become more expressive than ever, too.

HTML-in-canvas is exciting because it hints at a future where the document remains intact, but stops dictating the shape of the human experience. A conference website could still be represented as structured HTML, whilst being experienced as a landscape of talks and ideas. A supermarket website could build rich, interactive product explorations on top of their native HTML.

The machine-readable layer doesn’t disappear. It just becomes infrastructure.

For thirty years, we’ve largely shaped human experiences around what machines could reliably understand.

The strange possibility emerging now is that machines may finally be sophisticated enough to let us stop.

For AI, we can step down our HTML into simpler representations and presentations. For humans, maybe now we can step it up.

And if that’s true, then the future of the web may end up looking a lot less like documents, and a lot more like the things it’s trying to describe.