I used to struggle similarly. The DOM always seemed to get in the way of building dynamic user interfaces, and CSS's layout primitives made it hard to do the bo

I used to struggle similarly. The DOM always seemed to get in the way of building dynamic user interfaces, and CSS's layout primitives made it hard to do the border and anchor layouts that I was aiming for. Then it dawned on me: the DOM and CSS API's simply aren't meant to be used directly. They're like the X11 API. You need to wrap them into something saner to make sense of them. After that I adopted ExtJS. It puts a cross-browser wrapper around the browser API's, with its own component and layout system. Way easier to program with.