Virtual DOM Enabled Modern Frontends
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the past, present and future of Javascript
This was the moment front end development stopped being about hand editing page elements and started being about describing the screen as data. Before that, developers often grabbed DOM nodes directly, changed text, inserted HTML, and carefully managed what could update without breaking the rest of the page. Virtualized updating let frameworks calculate the smallest set of screen changes and apply them automatically, which made complex apps like feeds, dashboards, and video interfaces much easier to build and keep fast.
-
Backbone still reflected the older model. A view listened for model changes, then re rendered or manipulated its own DOM element. That was cleaner than raw jQuery, but developers still had to decide how HTML got rewritten. React made that bookkeeping part of the framework.
-
Angular pursued a different path, but the same goal. Its change detection system checks the component tree and updates only affected DOM elements, and features like trackBy help preserve focus, selection, and other UI state when lists change. The key shift was incremental updates instead of full page refreshes.
-
Once this model matured, the rest of Jamstack followed naturally. If the browser could own most UI logic and update itself efficiently, teams could ship mostly static assets on the front end and call external APIs for data, auth, and storage, instead of maintaining a tightly coupled server rendered app.
The next phase pushes the same idea further down the stack. Framework competition now centers less on whether virtualized updates work, and more on how little JavaScript ships, how fast pages build, and how much rendering can move between browser, server, and edge without losing the smooth update model users now expect.