For the past few months, Brian and I have been prototyping a new UI toolkit specifically targeted at browsers called "domkit". Its our intention to open source and include this in the standard Fantom distribution.

FWT-JS has served us quite well the past few years, but it was always a bit of a hack, grafting all kinds of desktop toolkit metaphors onto the DOM. Its been a cause of issues for weird edge cases in some browsers, and made it hard to leverage alot of the recent cool CSS features.

Domkit is a clean slate, a toolkit specifically target for the browser, and with the primary goal of providing a great API for writing user interfaces in Fantom, leveraging the best parts of browser innovation, while avoiding anything that would prevent us from utilizing new browser features down the road.

To realize this, we are planning on making some breaking changes to the dom pod. The dom pod is our "close-to-the-metal" API layer. Its meant to be the bare minimum interface to the DOM and browser features. The biggest problem is we polluted the Elem namespace with lots of conveniences, which take alot of good names we want to use for higher level widgets in domkit. But we also need more access to things like CSS classes, inline style, node manipulation, animation, and events.

We considered staging these changes to avoid breaking anything, but it would be alot of work, and dragged out over a long period of time, since we will definitely continue to tweak things until domkit stabilizes. So if anyone currently depends on dom, please feel free to contact me, and I can help minimize any transitions.

Otherwise we'll keep everyone posted when we have more to share!

Ah! That explains all the dom activity I've been seeing then!

It all sounds pretty cool, Andy!