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My guess was the DOM, too. But why does the DOM only exist in the web UI tech stack? There aren’t analogous constructs in other UI stacks (e.g., Windows Presentation Foundation), are there?

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I think the biggest difference is just that the layout algorithm for the DOM is a lot more complex than those for native apps. Changing one element might reflow the whole page. Native frameworks aren't like that, and the solution they're converging on is the one React pioneered for the web, which is making a control's data dependencies explicit so you know when it needs to be updated.

> But why does the DOM only exist in the web UI tech stack?

Maybe because "web UI stack" wasn't designed for "UI". It was designed for hypertext documents and DOM is a perfectly cromulent way to represent a HTML document.

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