I can see now why DOM manipulation was so catastrophic for performance on IE5-8, all that bookkeeping of character positions must have been a killer once the DO

I can see now why DOM manipulation was so catastrophic for performance on IE5-8, all that bookkeeping of character positions must have been a killer once the DOM tree was of any significant size. Makes me wonder. If edits to DOM nodes on legacy IE were focused on attribute values only, and the string-lengths of those edited attributes never changed, whether one could bypass the bookkeeping and get good performance gains.