LightningDOM

Why on earth would you re-implement the DOM?

And in Javascript?? You’ve got to be out of your minds! Well, it turns out there is actually a sane reason: speed. Most web developers know that the DOM is dog slow, particularly in IE-land. There are plans to fix this in IE8, Chrome and possibly Firefox 3.1, but for at least the next few years, we’ll be supporting browsers with a slow DOM.

But is it really too slow? I mean, can’t users wait a couple seconds for the page to load? After all, they’ve been doing it for years! No, they can’t wait. At least, not anymore. Google taught us the competitive advantage of speed and we’ve been trying (though it’s been tough in Web 2.0 land) to not look back.

http://blog.cornerstonenw.com/2008/09/10/donating-lightningdom/