This project is inactive, please consider moving to the fully compatible zeed-dom with ESM and Typescript support

hostic-dom

• Lightweight virtual DOM in pure Javascript
• Generates HTML and XML
• Parses HTML
• Supports CSS selectors and queries
• Can be used with JSX
• Easy content manipulation (e.g. through element.handle helper)
• Pretty print HTML (tidyDOM)

Does not aim for completeness!

This is a side project of hostic, the static website generator.

Example

A simple example without JSX:

import { h, xml } from "hostic-dom"

let dom = h(
  "ol",
  {
    class: "projects",
  },
  [
    h("li", null, "hostic ", h("img", { src: "logo.png" })),
    h("li", null, "hostic-dom"),
  ]
)

console.log(dom.render())
// Output: <ol class="projects"><li>hostic <img src="logo.png"></li><li>hostic-dom</li></ol>

console.log(dom.render(xml))
// Output: <ol class="projects"><li>hostic <img src="logo.png" /></li><li>hostic-dom</li></ol>

And this one with JSX:

import { h } from "hostic-dom"

let dom = (
  <ol className="projects">
    <li>hostic</li>
    <li>hostic-dom</li>
  </ol>
)

let projects = dom
  .querySelectorAll("li")
  .map((e) => e.textContent)
  .join(", ")

console.log(projects)
// Output: hostic, hostic-dom

dom.handle("li", (e) => {
  if (!e.textContent.endsWith("-dom")) {
    e.remove()
  } else {
    e.innerHTML = "<b>hostic-dom</b> - great DOM helper for static content"
  }
})

console.log(dom.render())
// Output: <ol class="projects"><li><b>hostic-dom</b> - great DOM helper for static content</li></ol>

In the second example you can see the special manipulation helper .handle(selector, fn) in action. You can also see HTML parsing works seamlessly. You can also parse directly:

import { vdom, tidyDOM } from "hostic-dom"

let dom = vdom("<div>Hello World</div>")
tidyDOM(dom)
console.log(dom.render())
// Output is pretty printed like: <div>
//   Hello World
// </div>

These examples are available at github.com/holtwick/hostic-dom-example.

JSX

Usually JSX is optimized for React i.e. it expect React.creatElement to exist and be the factory for generating the nodes. You can of course get the same effect here if you set up a helper like this:

import { html } from "hostic-dom"

var React = {
  createElement: html,
}

But more common is the use of h as the factory function. Here is how you can set up this behavior for various environments:

Babel.js

Add required plugins:

npm i -D @babel/plugin-syntax-jsx @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx

Then add this to .babelrc:

{
  "plugins": [
    "@babel/plugin-syntax-jsx",
    [
      "@babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx",
      {
        "pragma": "h"
      }
    ]
  ]
}

TypeScript

In tsconfig.json:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "jsx": "react",
    "jsxFactory": "h"
  }
}

ESBuild

In options:

{
  jsxFactory: "h"
}

Or alternatively as command line option: --jsx-factory=h

Browser DOM

The JSX factory can also be used to directly create HTML DOM nodes in the browser. Just create the h function and let it use the browser's document object:

const { hFactory } = require("hostic-dom")

export let h = hFactory({ document })

Unpkg

hostic-dom is also available via unpkg via https://unpkg.com/hostic-dom. The global name provided here is hosticDOM i.e. you can easily use it like this:

<script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/hostic-dom"></script>
<script>
  const { h } = hosticDOM
  // Your code here
</script>

Misc

• To set namespace colons in JSX use double underscore i.e. <xhtml__link /> becomes <xhtml:link />
• To allow CDATA use the helper function e.g. <div>{ CDATA(yourRawData) }</div>
• style attributes can handle objects e.g. <span style={{backgroundColor: 'red'}} /> becomes <span style="background-color: red" />