JSHTML where the DOM is made more literal in the javascript.

It is probably easier to turn off the divs with display none and "" and build them earlier in the JSP. There are some cases where you cannot avoid building the DOM in the javascript though.

The JSHTML idea reminds me of a place I worked at that had a horrid, horrid JSP which did all the work in java, it built the HTML in a java string and then to add to the WTFness it then output that string into the page DOM via javascript and a body onload event.

The problem for programmers is that often they feel more comfortable in the javascript than in the HTML or CSS. I have seen plenty of code which manipulates the DOM in a way that would be better done in CSS, but for the developer it is a way to perform that requirement in an area they know, in a manner they are confident with, and that in their minds eye will keep that functionality in one place.

The downside of abstraction is that it often litters the code with small discrete functionality in twenty million spots. It can make it hard to keep it all bundled in recent memory. As an example I was configuring a new module for Spring and the configuration ran across approximately six XML files. I would null out on startup as a new bean wasn't configured and would have to go and track each one down. The upside of configuration is that you normally have to do it once, the downside is that it meant I was searching through XML files to find out what had been abstracted where.