It's not part of javascript, it's part of the DOM API, and yes, that makes a difference. That's like calling C++ bad because you don't like boost, or calling py

It's not part of javascript, it's part of the DOM API, and yes, that makes a difference. That's like calling C++ bad because you don't like boost, or calling python bad because you don't like django. (I am not saying tho that there isn't plenty to criticize in javascript itself). The DOM API is not javascript specific. The API surface is defined in terms of WebIDL (Web Interface definition language). While it is most commonly found in browsers and therefore javascript, it is not specific to browsers or javascript. Browsers themselves ship various javascript environments that do not even include the DOM API at all (WebWorkers aka threads, ServiceWorkers, PAC all give you an environment without a DOM). nodejs doesn't come with a DOM (tho there is an implementation available in jsdom). There is nothing really preventing you from looking at the DOM spec and writing your own DOM API implementation for your preferred language. In fact Microsoft and Google used to do that for their in-browser support of vbscript and dart respectively, python ships with xml.dom (implementing an older version of the spec), java ships with org.w3c.dom (implementing an older version of the spec). There is a C# implementation in the AngleSharp library, somebody wrote a go implementation, and so on.