There's nothing about JS as a language meant specifically to "programatically manipulate the DOM in the browser".
Anything it does related to that is just simple library code and methods on the "document", "element", etc objects -- and that's only when run in the browser where those are available (automatically "imported" let's say). Node doesn't even have the "document" object.
Accessing the DOM is not really part of the language specification, but the browser API, no?
Re:JavaScript is Eating the World
by thehardsphere on Thursday August 24, 2017 @04:16PM
(#15093677)
And the "Browser API" was invented to do what, exactly? And by what mechanism was said API exposed to developers? And whose cocktail napkin was the specification written on?
>And the "Browser API" was invented to do what, exactly?
Whatever it was inveted to do is totally irrelevant, as the "browser API" is not Javascript the language/syntax but just an API (library/module).
In fact you could trivially implement it in all kinds of programming languages.
Uhh, what? You don't consider "programatically manipulate the DOM in the browser" to be a niche?