DOM API

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with DOM API, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

DOM is slow and cumbersome for building real applications2026-10-23
Requires tons of boilerplate and verbose code for the simplest tasks2025-08-06
DOM is inadequate for describing page layout, making layouts hard to build2025-08-06
Flat, non-modular API becomes a messy combinatorial explosion for developers2025-08-06
Developers find the DOM an awful API to work with2025-02-09
The DOM API is atrocious to work with, hard to use directly2024-10-27
Browser DOM lacks usable building blocks, so developers keep reinventing UI controls2024-04-13
DOM is hard to work with; synchronous layout makes it easy to make slow2024-03-05
Building UI with plain DOM calls like appendChild is cumbersome to write everywhere2024-01-01
NodeList must be converted to an array before doing anything useful2022-05-19
Extending web components is a major pain because the API is atrocious2020-07-17
Removing a node requires verbose, counter-intuitive parent-based call, hard for beginners2016-11-01
The DOM has historically been an unusable mess for developers2015-05-16
Raw DOM APIs are verbose and inconsistent, so developers fall back on libraries2013-03-19
Simple operations like deleting or inserting nodes require verbose, awkward code2009-09-30