[vladmoz]

The problem with the DOM is not that it's intrinsically slow, but that it's very easy to do slow things with it inadvertently. There are often N different ways to do things, due to the evolution of HTML. The newer approaches tend to be designed with things like GPU acceleration in mind (e.g. CSS transforms), whereas older methods often had lots of heavy interactions and computations because they weren't expected to be used dynamically.

Just like optimizing any software takes skill and knowledge, so too does writing HTML, whether dynamic or not. Tools for understanding what's going on with the DOM and with dynamic HTML are slowly becoming available as well, which will help with this.