Ironically, improving the DOM is actually something we're trying to do with Dart: http://www.dartlang.org/articles/improving-the-dom/.

Those "improvements" really don't address what is wrong with the DOM. The problem with the DOM isn't that it could use a more consistent API with better interface naming.

The DOM simply is a poor abstraction for applications. For example, it doesn't have a concurrency model and many modifications to the styling of individual elements or changes to the DOM structure can cause repaints and reflows.