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Comment by romellem | Hacker News Reader

Most modern UI frameworks wouldn’t work at all if this limitation “simply” existed. Being able to store non-string values on DOM nodes is an upside.

Acting this flippant isn’t helpful.

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To my non-webdev ears this sounds like "having only pegs and square holes isn't a problem because otherwise how would you try to fit one in the other?"

Could it be that this whole paradigm (which by the way has been devised for a different and much simpler use case, and abused forever since) isn't sustainable anymore?

I think the article missed an important “why” here that is confusing people here: JavaScript objects and the DOM are fundamentally different, and JavaScript is providing an API via the DOM for reading and writing HTML, which is essentially an XML document. We shouldn’t expect the objects in JavaScript to perfectly translate to their HTML counterparts or vice versa.

If anything, it’s odd that they added these conveniences like reflection that make it more magical than it should be.

(Edited for clarity)

> We shouldn’t expect the objects in JavaScript to perfectly translate to their DOM counterparts or vice versa.

Since JavaScript was invented specifically to manipulate the DOM, I'm not sure that that follows.

That's definitely one of the main original use cases, but it would have been a bad decision to base the entire language around the limitations of HTML, and I doubt JavaScript today would be the most popular programming language today if they had. You can read the original ECMAScript 1 standard here, which is titled: "A general purpose, cross-platform programming language"[1].

https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-262_1...

I think a lot of people dislike that JavaScript is a general purpose programming language, rather than being a scripting engine for browsers.

A lot of people dislike any tool that actually has wide spread usage. No one complains about tools that have been abandoned.

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrop

I wonder why the web technologies are not fully integrated like the Smalltalk and Self graphical environments... Is it impossible or did it just end up that way and it's too late to change it now?

Mostly the latter. The web wasn’t designed to become an application platform.

The DOM API is not designed as a JavaScript API (at least originally). It was designed to be language independent and to be more natural for a language like Java rather than JavaScript.

The reason for NodeList instead of Array is the same

For example the Event interface definition[0] contains parts like

  const unsigned short NONE = 0;

[0] https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#interface-event

That's used as a constant for eventPhase https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#ref-for-dom-event-none%E2%91%A2

In modern DOM APIs, it would be a string enum.

I did not mean to disparage the DOM API, I intended to show that the DOM API was not (initially) designed as a Javascript API and was instead expressed in a language independent (but Java inspired) IDL.

I would not surprise me if modern addition or revisions to the spec were more JS inspired

What do you mean by not sustainable? What has been more sustainable than web dev and web tech lol? Also, being flexible isn't trying to fit a square peg in a hole, it's the opposite actually.

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