Rethinking DOM from first principles

Browsers are in a very weird place. While WebAssembly has succeeded, even on the server, the client still feels largely the same as it did 10 years ago .

Enthusiasts will tell you that accessing native web APIs via WASM is a solved problem, with some minimal JS glue .

But the question not asked is why you would want to access the DOM. It's just the only option. So I'd like to explain why it really is time to send the DOM and its assorted APIs off to a farm somewhere, with some ideas on how.

I won't pretend to know everything about browsers. Nobody knows everything anymore, and that's the problem.

The 'Document' Model

Few know how bad the DOM really is. In Chrome, document.body now has 350+ keys, grouped roughly like this:

This doesn't include the CSS properties in document.body.style of which there are... 660 .

The boundary between properties and methods is very vague. Many are just facades with an invisible setter behind them.…