Proposal: Remove React.DOM (dom component factories) API and release as new module

The React.DOM API (not to be confused with ReactDOM) does not make sense in the greater scheme of the React API being used in other rendering environments like React Native or GL or <insert anything that isn’t the DOM>. The React.* API is meant to be universal in that sense. We are never going to add React.iOS.

However, these factories don’t actually have any implementation details that rely on actual DOM details, they essentially just map like so: React.DOM.div = (...args) => React.createElement('div', ...args), which is why they ended up in the universal React package and not in ReactDOM.

This would only impact people who don’t currently use JSX and have held out using the function call syntax. <div/> now (and has for over a year) transforms to React.createElement('div'). The conveniences of the function syntax are a big deal for many people (especially coffeescript users and those who are strongly anti-JSX) so we don’t want to break anybody, but we would like to migrate them from the core React API.

So the proposal would be a new package which just exports the exact set of things that React.DOM currently makes available. It would require some small changes to your code and a new package dependency, but is otherwise identical. Here’s what the change might look like.

// before
{div, span} = React.DOM

// after
{div, span} = require('react-some-other-package');

[tj]

Is there any reason to have these functions at all, vs JSX compiling to plain objects? It could be more user-friendly for the hand-written cases as well, and no need to import 'react' all the time or add it as a dep for many components.

[gaearon]

I don’t have full context on this so I can’t give a good reply. Here’s what I know about this:

• We still have a concept of “owner” which is a dynamic thing set by createElement that relies on global state about the currently executing render() method. I think the plan is to get rid of it (#6350) but that would mean deprecating string refs. Until _owner is gone we can’t generate objects all the time without screwing up string refs.
• We added a certain level of protection against XSS in user input in #4832 which tags every “safe” element coming from the code (as opposed to a user JSON) with a Symbol. These would be a bit of a pain to write by hand.
• There is a Babel plugin that makes JSX output inline objects. However we only recommend it in production because it effectively bypasses any propTypes validation or useful developer warnings.