Company
Date Published
Author
Andrea Chiarelli
Word count
1980
Language
-
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The article explores the limitations of the traditional Document Object Model (DOM) in web development, particularly its lack of encapsulation, which can lead to global processing conflicts such as unintended CSS and JavaScript manipulations. To address these issues, the piece introduces the Shadow DOM, a standard feature that provides encapsulation by creating a private DOM for HTML elements, thus preventing unwanted interference from global DOM manipulations. The article contrasts the Shadow DOM with the use of iframes, a common workaround that isolates components but introduces challenges such as limited responsiveness and complexity in data sharing between parent and child documents. By demonstrating how to implement the Shadow DOM in JavaScript, the article highlights its advantages over iframes, like better encapsulation and conflict avoidance, while also noting that iframes remain useful for embedding independent external pages.