ssdom.js: server-side DOM implementation

Overview

ssdom.js is a DOM implementation intended to be used on web servers. The typical use case is the dynamic construction of some HTML document in order to serialize it and send it to a web browser.

Goals

• Provide an implementation of the basic DOM manipulation functions and properties
• Ability to use the same DOM manipulation methods on the server and client (i.e. a web browser)
• Optimize for fast DOM generation and serilization and low overhead

Non-Goals

• Provide an implementation of the full DOM and HTML standards
• Simulate CSS stylesheets and other visual features
• Ability to run JavaScript inside a document

Dependencies

ssdom.js uses ES6 direct proxies to implement various DOM features that cannot be efficiently implemented using ES5. ES6 direct proxies are currently not support by Node.js. Use the harmony-reflect module and start node with the --harmony flag as a shim.

Tutorial

The following snippet shows how to create html documents and serialize them to strings.

// required for direct proxies
// start node with the --harmony flag
require('harmony-reflect');

var ssdom = require('ssdom.js');

var domImpl = ssdom.newImplementation();

var document = new domImpl.createHTMLDocument();

var p = document.createElement('p');
p.textContent = 'Hello world!';

var body = document.querySelector('body');
body.appendChild(p);

console.log(ssdom.stringify(document));