| ▲ | chrismorgan 3 days ago | |
A couple of issues that will arise from this: • Using DOM attribute or text nodes limits you to text only. This is, in practice, a very big limitation. The simple cases are Plain Old Data which can be converted losslessly at just an efficiency cost, like HTMLProgressElement.prototype.value, which converts to number. Somewhat more complex are things like classList and relList, each a live DOMTokenList mapping to a single attribute, which needs unique and persistent identity, so you have to cache an object. And it definitely gets more intractable from there as you add more of your own code. • Some pieces of state that you may care about aren’t stored in DOM nodes. The most obvious example is HTMLInputElement.prototype.value, which does not reflect the value attribute. But there are many other things like scroll position, element focus and the indeterminate flag on checkboxes. • Some browser extensions will mess with your DOM, and there’s nothing you can do about it. For example, what you thought was a text node may get an entire element injected into it, for ads or dictionary lookup or whatever. It’s hard to write robust code under such conditions, but if you’re relying on your DOM as your source of truth, you will be disappointed occasionally. In similar fashion, prevailing advice now is not to assume you own all the children of the <body> element, but to render everything into a div inside that body, because too many extensions have done terrible things that they should never have done in the first place. It’s a nice theory, but I don’t tend to find it scaling very well, applied as purely as possible. Now if you’re willing to relax it to adding your own properties to the DOM element (as distinct from attributes), and only reflecting to attributes or text when feasible, you can often get a lot further. But you may also find frustration when your stuff goes awry, e.g. when something moves a node in the wrong way and all your properties disappear because it cloned the node for some reason. | ||