dom VS WHATWG HTML Standard

My long-shot hope is that the page can come to embody most of the wiring on the page, that how things interact can be encoded there. Behavior of the page can be made visible! There's so much allure to me to hypermedia that's able to declare itself well.

This could radically enhance user agency, if users/extensions can rewire the page on the fly, without having to delve into the (bundled, minified) JS layers.

There's also a chance the just-merged (!) moveBefore() capability means that frameworks will recreate HTML elements less, which is a modern regression that has severely hampered extensions/user agency. https://github.com/whatwg/dom/pull/1307

in plain htmx, you can target an area that doesn't disrupt a playing video (e.g. the comments box appending to the comments) or you can use a morphing algorithm that disrupts the DOM less.

i have my own morphing algorithm (and a corresponding htmx plugin that allows you to use it) called idiomorph:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/idiomorph/

i've also been working with the chrome team to get a feature added they are calling "atomic moves":

https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/1255

this would allow us to move elements around in the DOM without losing things like play state or focus or whatever

very excited for this last idea, I think it will be a huge boon for the web in general, not just for htmx

What I said in my previous comment is observably true. Try making a demo where it isn't.

> A DOM node is a living mutable thing, but the JavaScript object representing that node is not.

The JavaScript object is mutable. The first example in the article shows this.

> That is also why a node list is not an array.

Modern APIs on the web return platform arrays (eg JavaScript arrays). https://webidl.spec.whatwg.org/#js-sequence - here's where the WebIDL spec specifies how to convert a sequence to a JavaScript array.

I'm fully aware of NodeList. There's a reason the spec calls them "old-style" https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#old-style-collections

> I can understand how this is confusing if you have never operated without a framework, but otherwise it’s really straightforward

Sighhhhhh. I've been a web developer for over 20 years, and spent a decade on the Chrome team working on web platform features. Most of my career has been on the low-level parts of the platform.

Could it be possible that people are disagreeing with you, not because they're stupid, but because you're in the wrong? Please try to be open minded. Try creating some demos that test your opinions.

Domenic Denicola (the man who ruined promises) probably will as well.

https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/67

I'm pretty sure it is, since I get "TypeError: nodes[i].parentNode.href is undefined" and "TypeError: $mainmenu.parent(...).get(...) is undefined" errors on both Pale Moon and LibreWolf. Which is part of Shadow/DOM, and originated from google (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web-components/). Not sure when this particular thing was introduced, since it's a "living standard"/experimental feature (https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/).

JSX chose to align names to the DOM spec [0]. Same for htmlFor and friends.

[0] https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#ref-for-dom-element-classname%E...

You can see why I say this here: https://dom.spec.whatwg.org

The product logos in this article's cover image include different languages and technologies some of which are still relevant for web development today: HTML, CSS, JavaScript / ES / TypeScript (and the DOM), SVG, PDF, PHP, SQL (mySQL, MariaDB), mongoDB, Node.js (the most successful server-side implementation of JavaScript so far).

Thanks for the shout-out! I think I mention this in the talk, but note that YMMV. I designed that benchmark as a kind of "worst-case scenario" where shadow DOM / scoped styles really show a benefit. Depending on your CSS rules, DOM size, and amount of thrashing, the perf benefit could be small to large.

Also, it's still possible to shoot yourself in the foot, especially if you have a large/complex stylesheet repeated across multiple shadow roots. (Not because of the repetition – that's optimized in browsers [1] – but rather because of the number of DOM nodes affected.)

That said, I still think the perf benefits of shadow DOM have been undersung. And Declarative Shadow DOM makes it way more useful.

[1]: https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/831#issuecomment-585489...

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5936#discussion_r5136422...

The problem is that no browser had (and still has) shipped the "stretch" keyword. (Blink likely will "soon" - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/SiZ2n... )

However this was pushed back against as this had to go in a specification - and nobody implemented it ("-webit-fill-available" would have been an acceptable substitute in Blink but other browsers didn't have this working the same yet).

Hence the calc() variant. (Primarily because of "box-sizing:content-box" being the default, and pre-existing border/padding styles on dialog that we didn't want to touch).

One thing to keep in mind is that any changes that changes web behaviour is under some time pressure. If you leave something too long, sites will start relying on the previous behaviour - so it would have been arguably worse not to have done anything.

It may still be possible to change to the stretch variant, however likely some sites are relying on the extra "space" around dialogs now, and would be mad if we changed it again. This might still be a net-positive however given how much this confuses web-developers (future looking cost), vs. the pain (cost) of breaking existing sites.

Sorry!

There's an open HTML specification issue about this problem, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any traction.

Customisable select I believe is the first to come out of it.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/rfc-customizable-select

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9799

Doesn't appear to be.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/9841

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9625

Seems to have been in the works since 2023, out in the open, with support by all major browser engines.

Agreed! There is a proposal for something like that in the WHATWG repo: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/8538

Issue #9075: March 2023, OddBird requests a method to view the current top layer order.

HTML5 Specification

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The issues were fixed actually.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/wiki/dialog--initial-focus,-a...

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/8199