Usually people think of DOM as part of JS standard API, similar to Java's standard platform API library. There are many JS books that usually cover DOM but rare

Usually people think of DOM as part of JS standard API, similar to Java's standard platform API library. There are many JS books that usually cover DOM but rarely books about DOM itself. As VBScript is dead, JS is the only language that uses that API. So you are technically correct. What is questionable is "both JQuery and D3 are vanilla js". JQuery is a JS framework that is usually not considered "native". On modern browser it nowadays calls newer DOM API functions like one can do with vanilla/standard JS5. D3 is JS library that is mainly based around SVG, it's usually not considered "native", it calls SVG and DOM APIs like one can do in JS5. Each layer/framework on top means an additional overhead in combined JS file size. "The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML, XML and SVG documents. [...] Though often accessed using JavaScript, the DOM itself is not a part of the JavaScript language, and it can be accessed by other languages, though this is much less common." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob...