You wrote I assume that the original author meant "changing" not replacing. Can you provide an example of using innerHtml that represents a change that is not a replacement? innerHtml is a property whose value -- a DOMString/String [*] -- can (aside from get) only be set. Setting a property is assigning a new value to it, which is akin to replacing the current value with with a new value. Thus, i am really curious about what the foundations of your assumption are... ([*] in JavaScript, strings are immutable)

Complementing the comment above, when you set the value of something, you're replacing the old value by the new one, which is the same as changing the value. To me, both words can be used interchangeably - unless there's a special use case where they can differ (in the that case, could you provide that?)

I think I can't provide that if we treat any change in the entire DOM (may it be for just one character) as a value change with the DOM as a whole (whatever comprises it) being a value of the document; due to your comments I have changed that phrasing.

deleted user, you seem to be confused. You cannot make a change to an existing DOM of an element through the element's innerHtml property other than replacing it. Note that innerHtml is a property of type DOMString. A DOMString is basically a string, not the/a DOM. If you get or set the innerHtml property, you are dealing with a string, not with a DOM. As such, talking about changing only some aspect of a element's DOM in the context of innerHtml is confusing and incorrect. All the innerHtml property allows is assigning a new string (DOMString) to it, which will result in the element receiving a new node tree (DOM, if you will) that is being created as a result of parsing the string. Read the documentation you linked to in your Q. It explains explicitly and clearly what is going on with innerHtml. It is not confusing, either. The probably only thing that makes it confusing for you is you making unfounded assumptions instead of just sticking with what the documentation tells you.

elgonzo‭ I seem to you to be "confused", okay, but I am not, I just had one or more mistakes, heavy down voting doesn't help and commenting about anything which isn't the mistake/s doesn't help, this why I can't focus on the actual help you seem to me to try to give; as I have said in another comment, I find the linked documentation page confusing and have hard time reading it.