Why I Like Using Maps (and WeakMaps) for Handling DOM Nodes (opens in new tab)

I'd say the big downside is that they don't support the general looking accessor that I'd wager way way way too many people will accidentally use. Myself definitely being one of them. Would have been better if they didn't "seem" to work with the wrong syntax, at least. But, alas, here we are.

That fix is not really a fix. The thing being broken for general serialization is JSON.

And how do deserialize it back to a StringMap without manually doing so? Being able to run a JSON.stringify and then JSON.parse on your state tree seamlessly is important imo.

What is a "mapping" structure?

That'd work for this specific case, but I think that was just a simplified example. A Map can store a value of any type, while the dataset property will always be a string. If you're only working with strings, it's a great option since you don't need to maintain a side data structure at all. But, serializing and deserializing arbitrary objects would be expensive.

Yeah, I’ve too noticed how hard it is to find any web development guidance involving direct DOM manipulation now!

I was recently refactoring some code and wondering whether to use a (JS) class… The search results were mostly about React Class Components. And I was contemplating building a reusable component… results from the past decade were split between React Components and Web components. (In retrospect I should’ve tried DDG or something not connected to my search history lol).

Anyway where are the vanilla JS/TS DOM manipulators blogging these days? I guess here is one, thankful for the post :)

Same applies to Set, too. You can store an object, or instance, then use "has" to check for it.

Not for me. The DOM is virtually always a poor fit for your view model. You will need to abstract it to stay sane, sooner or later. Manipulating DOM is slow and fraught with performance cliffs.

In my opinion, DOM nodes should be disposable. A means to display data through the browser, not more. I avoid storing custom data on them, I avoid association like in the blog post. 98% of the time, you just want a simple transform from domain data into DOM nodes, for display. You really don't want to care which DOM nodes. This is how React works, and the reason why it is successful.

Granted, once you get into the hundreds of elements updated at interactive rates, you may have to mess with the DOM directly, because you can't trust React to be smart about it. That's still just a consequence of DOM being terribly inefficient for historical reasons.

Because a Map is an Object. It has properties and methods. The only way to provide a safe and clean namespace for your keys is to provide an explicit API. It also supports keys that can be not only strings or symbols.

Several things such as standard way for adding, removing and checking for keys, built-in size property, extensibility.

You think "key in object" is better than "maaaaap.has(key)"? I don't because it's unpredictable and prone to exceptions.

Give them a try. It's not a complete replacement for regular old objects