Comment by TheSheriff on "The one thing that no one properly explains about React — Why Virtual DOM"

So, does the vDOM do the WHOLE DOM? or just a specified singular element? I assume vDOM is based on something like MutationSummary (https://github.com/rafaelw/mutation-summary) for picking up changes to it? Furthermore is the vDOM essentially just a JSON/similar representation of the real DOM?
Is it possible to view/access the vDOM in react?

Yes, a copy of the whole DOM tree is maintained in the form of plain JavaScript objects. It seems MutationSummary is a library just to keep track of the DOM changes. VirtualDOM is different. Think of it as a proxy to your DOM.

It is more like this library here: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom

Instead of updating the DOM when your application state changes, you simply create a virtual tree or VTree, which looks like the DOM state that you want. virtual-dom will then figure out how to make the DOM look like this efficiently without recreating all of the DOM nodes.

Why would you want to access the virtual DOM? I'm not sure, but there is no direct access to it that I know of.

Also, I recommend reading this article for the "How-it-works" part of the Virtual DOM: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/diff/

@saiki Essentially I want to serialise the DOM and send it to a server. However, what I also want to do is save any changes to the DOM and send only the changes too. But it feels like the vDOM isn't exactly what I'm looking for?
I say this because I need to access/select the virtual DOM in order to send it somewhere. Where as, with react it feels like it does this all in the background and then just outputs the results for the browser engine to process.

I hope I explained myself well enough there.

@hipkiss91 Ah, I see! Probably the dom-serialize library along with MutationSummary, will be of help. This is a super interesting use case; let us know what solution you come up with, when you do. :)

@saiki Thanks for the pointer! Unfortunately I did actually already create a DOM serialiser! Thanks for the interest too :). I just thought I might be barking up the wrong tree (see what I did there). Thanks again

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