[flagged]
[1] I loathe this term, by the way. It's one of those terms that, I think, belong to a discipline of developers who love to obfuscate everything, even simple concepts, with unnecessarily opaque terminology until nobody can understand what the hell anyone is talking about anymore.
the problem is that the typical modern web page is considered as a combination of immediate-mode and retained-mode.
therefore, as it is wasteful to update all the page when only a few components on the page change, people want to only update parts of the page immediately when changes happen.
furthermore the typical modern web page only makes sense in the context of the modern web site, so some pages are almost everything on the page needs to update all the time, some pages are nothing here needs to update until the user does anything, some pages are nothing here needs to update at all, and other pages are just a couple components need to update all the time based on various things.
This context of what a web site is like is very much determined by the type of the site, where many e-commerce sites are affected by all sorts of data that occur outside of whatever page the user is on and need to update all sorts of different components on a page, many governmental sites are almost just static, with all sorts of variations in between.
Maybe <canvas> if you clear it on every frame.
>As I understand it, React was an attempt to shoehorn "immediate-mode UI"[1] on top of retained-mode UI
which I interpreted as the only possible meaning, in relation to React, being UI components that must rerender as close to immediately as possible vs. UI components that do not need immediate rerendering when the underlying data has changed.
I realize that is not a particularly correct use of the phrases, but then that is what happens when you use a concept from one type of development metaphorically in another type of development, memetic slippage as it were.
> In immediate mode, the scene (complete object model of the rendering primitives) is retained in the memory space of the client, instead of the graphics library. This implies that in an immediate mode application, the lists of graphical objects to be rendered are kept by the client and are not saved by the graphics library API. The application must re-issue all drawing commands required to describe the entire scene each time a new frame is required, regardless of actual changes.
React is simulating immediate mode by having the developer describe the full rendered result from the current data state. The developer / app code doesn't need to keep track of what changes need to be done to get the browser from its current state to the desired state, React does that for you.
Retained mode is where the developer / app does have to concern itself with the current browser state and issue the desired updates themselves, like how everything was done in the jquery era and earlier.
These are requirements the DOM / CSSOM addresses, you'd probably not have an easy time getting this right in a <canvas>.