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A lot of what you're saying is about the history of DOM. You even admit that some of your complaints don't hold anymore, so I don't understand what is the point

A lot of what you're saying is about the history of DOM. You even admit that some of your complaints don't hold anymore, so I don't understand what is the point of holding on to them. And I don't think it follows that just because SGML wasn't designed for SPAs in 1986 that the browser infrastructure we have today is not good for applications. Von Neumann architecture computers weren't designed for playing MP3s, but somehow they manage to do it pretty well. Because I look at all the GUI toolkits out there (and in the last twenty years I've used a LOT of different ones), and none of them are idealistically "good". I don't see anything particularly special about other toolkits that makes DOM look particular bad. In fact, I tend to think of DOM as being pretty good in comparison, if only for the fact that it works on everything. "createElement and then set attributes one by one" is no different than any other toolkit. They pretty much all have a simple, static editor syntax for doing bulk element creation and attribute setting, and then a verbose API for dynamic element creation. It's low level because your use case is not the only use case it needs to support. I've seen--and built--a bunch of systems that have tried to simplify it and it always loses something in translation. So maybe you're complaint isn't with DOM. Maybe you just don't like user interface programming in general.

maga 10y ago
> A lot of what you're saying is about the history of DOM. That's because my whole point was to elaborate on the statement I made in the first comment: >The legitimate grievances associated with JS over the years were due to the browser APIs and first of all DOM, People who were complaining about web dev and JS over the years were mostly doing it because of the browser APIs and DOM, hence my recollection of recent history. And of course I do point out what was fixed, and I said from the start that it's far better now than it was before. I'm rooting for VanillaJS after all. I cannot comment on other GUI toolkits since I don't work with them. You may be right that they too are low level, and I wholeheartedly you're right about DOM being better, because I hope DOM with Web Platform replaces them all one day. That doesn't exempt DOM from criticism though. Technically DOM still doesn't have API for bulk element creation since innerHTML/insertAjacent comes as a separate API which is still a working draft. But that's just details. There is another problem somewhat related to DOM being low level. Although it has to do with the browser implementations rather than the standard, it's still a problem for the end user, and the user is going to blame it on the web/JS being bad in general. That is performance. As it was mentioned here, DOM is separated from JS engine in browsers. Calls to DOM from JS are a lot more expensive than calls inside the engine. This gave rise to the whole Virtual DOM movement we see taking over the web dev. It's not just the verbosity of low level DOM that pushes people towards React and such, but the fact that at the end of the day their approach of mimicking DOM in the engine and limiting the DOM calls turns out to be more performant that the low level manipulations we do directly on the DOM.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  That is incorrect. React is faster than destroying the document and rebuilding it from scratch on every day's change. It is slower than making your own stateful edits.
  - maga 10y ago
    True, but the culprit is still DOM calls being expensive. Virtual DOM minimizes those calls through various optimizations, including not destroying elements unnecessarily as you said, but it's not limited to it. Consider the following scenario. You have two handlers on an event that both change the DOM and may result in cancelling each other. With the "raw" DOM you'll end up calling DOM at least twice (and changing it twice if no debouncing is used), whereas Virtual DOM both times calls to, well, its "virtual" DOM (which is a lot cheaper) and by the time it gets to its next cycle of updating the "real" DOM it may not need to change anything or do it once. These optimizations are hard to implement without resorting to a virtual DOM of one sort or another.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      Funny, I've gotten by fine for the last twenty years without it.
      - maga 10y ago
        Well, I'm with you since I'm still not using React. But one has to acknowledge the point it makes about DOM handling.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  > Calls to DOM from JS are a lot more expensive than calls inside the engine. Sort of. Calls to DOM from JS are a few dozen machine instructions for the call itself in modern browsers; a little more if lots of arguments are involved. The slowness is what the DOM implementation actually has to _do_ as a result of the call. If you write a loop in which you repeatedly modify styles and then ask for geometry information, then the only options an implementation has are to provide stale geometry information (the virtual DOM approach!) or end up with that loop being a lot slower than asking for all the geometry information up front and then doing your modifications. We can have a useful discussion about whether it should be possible to ask for stale geometry information, but that has nothing to do with calls from JS into the DOM per se; a DOM implemented in JS but exposing the same API as the current DOM would have _exactly_ the same problem in that regard.

maga 10y ago

> A lot of what you're saying is about the history of DOM. That's because my whole point was to elaborate on the statement I made in the first comment: >The legitimate grievances associated with JS over the years were due to the browser APIs and first of all DOM, People who were complaining about web dev and JS over the years were mostly doing it because of the browser APIs and DOM, hence my recollection of recent history. And of course I do point out what was fixed, and I said from the start that it's far better now than it was before. I'm rooting for VanillaJS after all. I cannot comment on other GUI toolkits since I don't work with them. You may be right that they too are low level, and I wholeheartedly you're right about DOM being better, because I hope DOM with Web Platform replaces them all one day. That doesn't exempt DOM from criticism though. Technically DOM still doesn't have API for bulk element creation since innerHTML/insertAjacent comes as a separate API which is still a working draft. But that's just details. There is another problem somewhat related to DOM being low level. Although it has to do with the browser implementations rather than the standard, it's still a problem for the end user, and the user is going to blame it on the web/JS being bad in general. That is performance. As it was mentioned here, DOM is separated from JS engine in browsers. Calls to DOM from JS are a lot more expensive than calls inside the engine. This gave rise to the whole Virtual DOM movement we see taking over the web dev. It's not just the verbosity of low level DOM that pushes people towards React and such, but the fact that at the end of the day their approach of mimicking DOM in the engine and limiting the DOM calls turns out to be more performant that the low level manipulations we do directly on the DOM.

moron4hire 10y ago
That is incorrect. React is faster than destroying the document and rebuilding it from scratch on every day's change. It is slower than making your own stateful edits.
- maga 10y ago
  True, but the culprit is still DOM calls being expensive. Virtual DOM minimizes those calls through various optimizations, including not destroying elements unnecessarily as you said, but it's not limited to it. Consider the following scenario. You have two handlers on an event that both change the DOM and may result in cancelling each other. With the "raw" DOM you'll end up calling DOM at least twice (and changing it twice if no debouncing is used), whereas Virtual DOM both times calls to, well, its "virtual" DOM (which is a lot cheaper) and by the time it gets to its next cycle of updating the "real" DOM it may not need to change anything or do it once. These optimizations are hard to implement without resorting to a virtual DOM of one sort or another.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Funny, I've gotten by fine for the last twenty years without it.
    - maga 10y ago
      Well, I'm with you since I'm still not using React. But one has to acknowledge the point it makes about DOM handling.
bzbarsky 10y ago
> Calls to DOM from JS are a lot more expensive than calls inside the engine. Sort of. Calls to DOM from JS are a few dozen machine instructions for the call itself in modern browsers; a little more if lots of arguments are involved. The slowness is what the DOM implementation actually has to _do_ as a result of the call. If you write a loop in which you repeatedly modify styles and then ask for geometry information, then the only options an implementation has are to provide stale geometry information (the virtual DOM approach!) or end up with that loop being a lot slower than asking for all the geometry information up front and then doing your modifications. We can have a useful discussion about whether it should be possible to ask for stale geometry information, but that has nothing to do with calls from JS into the DOM per se; a DOM implemented in JS but exposing the same API as the current DOM would have _exactly_ the same problem in that regard.