[bobbylarrybobby]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they mean that if you want to modify the DOM with JS, you cannot batch your updates into an atomic transaction; every modification is applied immediately. However, presumably there is something, somewhere, that can collect modifications and apply them concurrently, because this would be such an insanely obvious optimization to miss for non-JS-driven updates to the DOM (such as initial page load).

[kevincox]

It isn't two APIs, but there is effectively some batching. The main thing to focus on is triggering layouts. Basically you want to do all of your reads together then all of your writes.

For example imagine we are trying to move one element to the location of another one. This code will be slow because the read of `leader.offsetTop` will need recalculate the layout to see if that write of `follower.style.left` changed the position of `leader`.

    let x = leader.offsetLeft;
    follower.style.left = `${x}px`;
    let y = leader.offsetTop;
    follower.style.top = `${y}px`;
    

However the following code is fast because it can read all of the values that were calculated during the last render (for the user to see) and doesn't trigger an intermediate relayouts.

    let x = leader.offsetLeft;
    let y = leader.offsetTop;
    follower.style.left = `${x}px`;
    follower.style.top = `${y}px`;

But I am not aware of any explicit batching UI.