Why preserve the DOM?

Keeping the generated markup close to the original component has several advantages:

• Responsiveness is not a concern. Skullmaster preserves your component’s DOM structure, so if the original component is responsive, the generated skeleton will be responsive too. A getBoundingClientRect()-based box approach would freeze one screen size.
• You don’t need to maintain a separate skeleton. The generated skeleton always mirrors the rendered output.

The accessibility tension

A skeleton made of the real markup would be read out as content — a p announced as text, a button announced as a control you can tab to. So the result still behaves like a skeleton: Skullmaster injects ARIA attributes and strips meaningful information out of the source (see How it works).