jsx

Repeating a blog post over and over doesn't make it true. The author is wrong. Most of his statements are about React, not JSX. It's syntactical sugar for nested function calls, that's all. Brackets are turned into function statements, attributes are turned into object props. The author conflates React properties with JSX, which is wrong. The author also confused JSX limitations, you cannot do statements because it's a single expression. Please go read the JSX spec instead of some random blog post. https://github.com/facebook/jsx

It's actually a fairly small change (two new PrimaryExpressions), the spec is here: https://github.com/facebook/jsx Example parser from Acorn: https://github.com/acornjs/acorn-jsx/blob/master/index.js No part of JSX uses the DOM, it doesn't share anything with HTML. The JS engine itself would need the modification. Also JSX doesn't have to be for the UI, it could be for dialogs for an NPC in a game, for configs, etc. edit: I agree with @proxyon, I'm really disappointed with HN that this simple fact is downvoted without retort. The common sentiment here is wrong, JSX is a small extension to the grammar of JS. It is JS.