Parallel DOM

Ractive works by maintaining a simplified model of the part of the DOM that it's responsible for. This model contains all the information - about data-binding, event handling and so on - that it needs to keep things up-to-date.

You can inspect the parallel DOM to understand what's going on under the hood, if you're into that sort of thing. Each Ractive instance, once rendered, has a fragment property. Each fragment has a number of properties:

• contextStack - the context stack in which mustache references should be evaluated
• root - a reference to the Ractive instance to which it belongs
• owner - the item that owns this fragment (in the case of the root fragment, the same as root)
• items - the items belonging to this fragment

Items means elements, text nodes, and mustaches. Elements may have fragments of their own (i.e. if they have children). A partial mustache will have a fragment, and a section mustache will have zero or more fragments depending on the value of its keypath.

Elements may also have attributes, which have a different kind of fragment (a text fragment as opposed to a DOM fragment), containing text and mustaches.

Each item has a descriptor, which is something like DNA. This comes straight from the parsed template.

This is the briefest of overviews - if you want to gain a deeper understanding of what's going on under the hood, use the source.