the dom is a terribly designed api, it has to be one of the worst apis I have ever used

to change a nodeName, you have to clone its children and replicate its attributes.

to delete on object,

object.parentNode.removeChild(object);

to insert after an element

object.parentNode.insertBefore(newObject, object.nextSibling);

and that only works by auto'magic' nonsense.

things like jquery would still be around if the browser all implemented everything nicely because the dom api is just terrible