[X4]

Why don't you precompute the space things use, including the text that is drawn using a matrix? You could easily calculate the baseline of anything by just doing matrix multiplications then.

However, I think you would still end up using a hack. The general idea of creating a replacement for the DOM has bugged me for a while too. It is a great to replace the DOM completely by a statemachine, I think. We need a New Document Model that supports "Batch Operations", is "Stateful" and uses the latest best performing algorithms published to do so.

Components are the CORRECT way, I fully agree with the facebook team here.

It seems that there is one guy who ALREADY DID all those things and replaced the DOM by something that's more akin to 2013's technology requirements. Link: http://www.nidium.com/