Comment by bikeshaving
5 years ago
> One classic example we ran into was DOM that we'd just rendered suddenly had a different structure because Google Translate would insert new DOM nodes.
Gosh, this continues to be one of the problems I have with all of the major frameworks. Rather than assuming the DOM is a mutable, shared resource like it actually is, they treat unexpected DOM changes as undefined behavior, and will usually break at the slightest attempts by browsers or extensions to help the user. The Google Translate issue is still largely unsolved, and I’m always frustrated whenever I attempt to translate a blog post on development from Chinese and find out that it’s not working because they’ve decided to render in client-side with React.
React does make this worse, but even with vanilla JavaScript, having a third party make arbitrary changes to the DOM means that there may be no way to safetly perform certain operations.
Expecting every website developer to code defensively for every single operation is unsustainable. A better solution might be to just build APIs for common cases; like creating new nodes that are anchored to existing DOM nodes.