Life after DOM

I recently saw Linus Torvalds talk in a clip about how people say "most of what I code is written by AI," when actually most of it is written by their compiler. This is of course blatantly false since those of us in JavaScript-Land think they have never used a compiler, and we won't allow ourselves be convinced otherwise.

However, we have a different sacred cow that no one knows what it actually is: the DOM. "How can you be a web developer without knowing the DOM?" you might ask. Well, how can you be a web developer without knowing what a browser does? I don't really know.

And that's probably most of us. But hey, we are adaptable. There now is a whole new generation of web developers that never even had to use jQuery, PHP, or use JavaScript outside of a framework. When I started working 6 years ago, I started with React right away. Yeah, I had built some ugly-looking HTML site at school, but frameworks were the thing to be doing, so I never had to learn what is going on under the hood. A lot of developers like me probably don't even know how they could use the DOM API from within their framework. Not that you should be doing that, obviously. Anyone who has fought with React's useRef just to focus an input knows the DOM is always lurking.

Oh, how naïve we were. Wouldn't it be nice to move back to a mostly HTML and CSS world? Well, fortunately it's happening. It'll be a while before us in the real world switch over though.

So this week, I asked AI to read the documentation. If you want all the gritty details, I recommend checking out MDN's guides.

It's not mind-blowing to learn how it works. Some sort of element tree, yeah, expected. Events, yup. An API. But the fact that you use these technologies all the time, under an ever-growing, sheet of abstraction, is crazy. It makes you realize how much there is to learn and get good at.

I want to write a bad framework, just to figure out how it works. It wouldn't take much.

You'd need a way of converting your syntax to create DOM Elements from. You'd need to track state internally. You'd need to trigger rebuilds and update the DOM accordingly. Let's do that. Next post, though. For sure.