Now to be fair, I’ve dunked on shadow DOM a bit in the past myself… such as when it’s used as a container for piles of JavaScript-generated HTML that would be better off in the page from the start. But the more I’ve worked with web components, the more I’ve come to see that shadow DOM (and slots in particular) may still play an interesting role in the HTML Web Components story.

For years now, though, I’ve been using Tachometer for most browser-based benchmarks. It’s featured in this blog a few times, although I’ve never written specifically about it. Tachometer doesn’t make benchmarking totally foolproof, but it does automate a lot of the trickiest bits. What I like best is that it:

RetroV (pronounced “retro vee”) is a virtual DOM (VDOM) rendering library. It is “vanilla” JavaScript, browser-native, and has no dependencies or build system.

The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX. It happened because we were fed a line.