Mako Allen (@makoallen.bsky.social)

Bad Doms Are A Pain In The Ass Not the kind you’re thinking of. I’m talking about the Document Object Model, or DOM. I’m in the process of rewriting and vastly improving my behavior chart app, weminder. And one of the technologies in my stack is React, and its accompanying support library, react-router-dom. Because of other technologies in my stack, I’m currently using version 5 of r-r-d. So a day or so ago, I was working on the part of the code where one user invites another to participate in a chart, and my helpful AI assistant, who I call Riley, suggested I do a particular technical something, using a particular feature of r-r-d that comes in version 6 . But I don’t use version 6. So it suggested I upgrade. Which after some wrestling with indecision I decided to do. This, as it turns out, was a Very Bad Choice™. Why? Because of that OTHER part of my stack, the Ionic Framework. I got halfway through the upgrade, and things were just not going well. So I consulted ANOTHER AI, the support bot over at the Ionic discord, which told me that they explicitly use react-router-dom version 5 and have no plans to upgrade at this time. Oy. So now I’m walking it back. These are the kinds of hoops you jump through when you’re developing an app, and you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re responsible for the whole thing, soup-to-nuts. But at least I get to vent about it here. http://www.onlydoing.net/blog/2025/1/14/bad-doms-are-a-pain-in-the-ass