Inconsistently Insightful

Uh oh, its almost the end of 2015 so I'd better put at least one blog post here for posterity! About ten years ago, I was at a startup I co-owned and searching for a way to easily create a nice-looking UI for a Windows-based utility. Since this was a Windows app, most people at the time would have chosen C or C++ as the language or used C# and a framework like .NET. Or perhaps they would have gone old-school with something like MFC. Instead, we hosted the Windows HTML rendering engine in our own executable and built 80 percent of the app (including 99 percent of the user interface) in JavaScript and HTML. Basically, this would be a Cordova app today, but we coded it uphill both ways back then. A short time into development, it was becoming clear that there had to be a better way to organize all the DOM manipulation that had to be done. I looked around and tried a few libraries available at the time, but they seemed a bit ugly and weren't helping that much. Then, almost ten ...