This is a brain dump from a Twitter/IRC discussion with @panesofglass and @bryanedds. So there is this brand-new thing called Facebook React and hype wave about Virtual DOM. I only skimmed this library, but here are some reasons why I remain sceptical: Identity! Typical DOM trees are a lot more than the markup. They are full of pieces of state that are *opaque* - abstract types, and *mutable*. This is especially true if you use 3rd-party libraries, but even with vanilla DOM, input tag, once rendered, int[...]