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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

If this works, why don't browsers do this natively?

Because it would not be backward compatible, eg:

    el.style.color = "red" // write
    console.log(el.style.color) // read
    el.style.color = "green" // write
    console.log(el.style.color) // read

Outputs: "red" then "green".

Batched: it outputs "green" then "green".

There could be a flag included in the HTTP response header (X-Batch-DOM) or a meta tag like <meta http-equiv="X-Batch-DOM" content="1">. The response header would be a better place for that flag since you can stick a meta tag at any point in your markup (even where it's incorrect to do so). The browser could choose to ignore the meta tag if any JS has executed or it could reload the page with the setting turned on. Not ideal. Anyway, if you feel completely sure that your code would not do anything like you've demonstrated then batching might work fine. Though this basically excludes the safe use of externally linked scripts that you can't control (analytics is one example).

By reading the README I guess that exceptions would be an issue. With fastdom they are thrown asynchronously, so a different API is required to catch them.

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