I consider myself a JS-person, but if I were honest, I speak jQuery/backbone, not pure Javascript.

But DOM is separate from JavaScript.

DOM is separate from Ecmascript, but is actually one of the 3 components of Javascript (along with Ecmascript and the BOM). This is at least according to Professional Javascript for Web Developers (you can see it on 'page 3' in the Amazon preview).

The sources I've read (Douglas Crockford or Wikipedia) clearly state that DOM is separate from JavaScript.

Only theoretically.

Javascript is a way to manipulate the DOM, no matter whan those nutters who run it on servers say.

Nope, it's the truth. You can have JavaScript without the DOM in a Node.js or a CouchDB environment, for example.

I would say that what node.js runs is ecmascript with it's own API that differs from the DOM. It's called javascript for convenience, but then what separates javascript from ecmascript?

Nothing. It is only different in name. Oracle owns the actual copyright on JavaScript via Sun. ECMAscript was used so the ECMA would not have to worry about this.

I guess this is a point of contention. Javascript is considered by many to be an implementation of ECMAscript that also provides additional features (the additional features, according to the book I cited, being the DOM and BOM).