How to manage HTML DOM with vanilla JavaScript only?
Making decent UI&#x27;s went from bicycle science to rocket science. VB-classic was easy to learn and easy to use, and you had coordinate control over where most things went on the screen. If your layout engine didn&#x27;t put it where you had planned, you can just tell the widget to &quot;go right here&quot;. You felt in charge of the screen, not some abstract layout layer with an attitude. A manager (person) could draw something on the back of a napkin and you could make it <i>exactly</i> match the napkin because you were in charge of exactly where things went. (Layout engines were optional then.)<p>The newer UI frameworks are round-about and confusing. They make it easy to get 80% of what you want, but that last 20% is bear, requiring long trial-and-error periods, unless you are heavily versed in them. Abstraction is only nice when it does what you want, not when it becomes &quot;abstract art&quot;.<p>The price for &quot;responsive&quot; (client-side auto-placement) has been huge. In applications that are primarily for office desktops, their advantage is lost. Mouse and PC&#x27;s is still where most real work is done. Instead we are using things like Bootstrap, designed for social networks, not real work. Glamour won over logic.<p>It&#x27;s great job security for UI experts, but expensive for organizations because they need stack specialists whereby before a one-man-band (or 2) could make useful apps for less than half the cost and time without having to spend years with UI-Yoda to master some screwy layout engine.<p>Something is wrong.