Comment by econ

Most browser things live in a bubble of ignorance about what people are trying to build.

It's not overly ambitious to have rich text input fields or a sortable table. If you can have a half assed xpath implementation you can have a shopping cart and a product.

Someone knowledgable once ran off with a fumble of mine acting like I pulled gold from thin air.

It took the id's from the page, created strings with the same name containing the inner html, made a copy, compared the copy with the string every 50ms, if they were no longer the same the dom node and the copy were updated with the new value. Input fields compared the copy with the input value as well.

So you could do:<div id="myname">my name <div>

Then do myname += "John";

Or <div id="a">42<div><input id="b" value="123">

Then do a = a * b / 2