React is designed so that you should never need to read from the DOM except thin... | Hacker News

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sophiebits on Jan 22, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: We spent a week making Trello boards load fast

React is designed so that you should never need to read from the DOM except things like an input field's value. React specifically tries to never touch the DOM except when doing necessary mutations.

If you're doing complicated layout code, then you will need to read from the DOM. Currently React doesn't have great support for managing layout from JS in a clean, efficient way but it's one of the things we're looking to add in the future.

masklinn on Jan 22, 2014 [–]

> React is designed so that you should never need to read from the DOM

Oh absolutely, sorry if that was not clear.

But sometimes you need to (e.g. to place an overlay or tooltip thing over an element), and AFAIK that remains possible.

sophiebits on Jan 22, 2014 | [–]

Correct.

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