static-jsx

v1.0.1

Published

2 years ago

A simple static renderer for JSX.

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jsx static react

static-jsx

static-jsx is a simple, dependency-free JSX runtime which renders JSX directly to raw HTML strings. It is intended to be used to power a static HTML template engine, closer to something like Handlebars, Nunjucks, etc. than React; it is not a replacement for most use-cases of React or similar libraries such as Preact and Nano JSX.

Usage

There are example projects under the examples directory corresponding to various ecosystems. These example projects are tested for correct functionality using npm run test:examples, which is part of npm test.

The preface to this section gives a general overview of the API surface and supported functionality. For more targeted guidance for particular frameworks, see the subsections below.

This library supports both the "classic" and "automatic" JSX transforms:

Using the "classic" transform, you must manually import the h and Fragment members of the main static-jsx module and instruct your JSX transpiler to use these names for the corresponding functionality. It is usually possible to do this using the following pattern:
```
/** @jsx h */
/** @jsxFrag Fragment */
import { Fragment, h } from "static-jsx";

// Your JSX code here
```
Using the "automatic" transform, you don't need to import anything manually; the appropriate runtime imports will be added automatically by your transpiler. You still must instruct your transpiler to use the static-jsx runtime library, however, which is available as static-jsx/jsx-runtime. It is usually possible to do this using the following pattern:
```
/** @jsxImportSource static-jsx */

// Your JSX code here
```

JSX elements may be normal HTML elements (including custom elements), which are spelled with a lowercase first letter (e.g. div, h1, etc.), or components, which are spelled with an uppercase first letter (e.g. Fragment, SiteHeader, etc.). Only function components are supported: the component may accept a single props object, containing the attributes passed to the component (including the special children prop, containing the component's children, if any), and must return an instance of RawHtml (which can be satisfied by returning any JSX expression).

Here is an example of how components can be used to abstract common page elements:

const Navigation = ({ navItems }) => (
  <nav>
    <ul>
      {navItems.map((item) => (
        <li>
          <a href={item.url}>{item.title}</a>
        </li>
      ))}
    </ul>
  </nav>
);

const PageContent = ({ children, title }) => (
  <main>
    <heading>
      <h1>{title}</h1>
    </heading>

    {children}
  </main>
);

const Footer = () => <footer>Copyright 2021 Ian Johnson</footer>;

const Page = ({ children, navItems, title }) => (
  <>
    <Navigation navItems={navItems} />
    <PageContent title={title}>{children}</PageContent>
    <Footer />
  </>
);

The return type of every JSX expression is an instance of RawHtml. RawHtml is simply a wrapper around a string containing raw HTML data, to distinguish it from normal strings, which are assumed to require escaping before interpolating into HTML. The raw HTML can be obtained using the html property; in the opposite direction, instances of RawHtml can be constructed directly from strings to mark them as safe for direct insertion into HTML.

Here is a simple example to illustrate how JSX and RawHtml work:

const body = "<p>Paragraph</p>";

const element1 = <div>{body}</div>;
// element1 is an instance of RawHtml
console.log(element1.html);
// Prints <div>&lt;p&gt;Paragraph&lt;/p&gt;</div>

const element2 = <div>{new RawHtml(body)}</div>;
// element2 is also an instance of RawHtml
console.log(element2.html);
// Prints <div><p>Paragraph</p></div>

When using static-jsx to produce a complete HTML page, RawHtml is also useful for adding the doctype, which is not supported by JSX natively:

import { RawHtml } from "static-jsx";

const page = (
  <>
    {new RawHtml("<!DOCTYPE html>")}
    <html lang="en">
      <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
        <title>Example page</title>
      </head>
      <body>Hello, world!</body>
    </html>
  </>
);

Node.js

You can install static-jsx using any package manager using the NPM registry, such as NPM itself:

npm install static-jsx

From here, you will need to set up your transpiler. The automatic JSX transform is recommended, since it avoids manual imports, but either the classic or automatic JSX transform may be used.

Note: this package is ESM only, so it cannot be used with require. Additionally, the automatic JSX transform, which will implicitly import static-jsx/jsx-runtime, relies on support for the exports field in package.json to resolve this module. This causes issues for certain tools (notably, TypeScript) which do not currently understand this field. The classic JSX transform can be used in this case, at the cost of manual imports in JSX files.

Babel

You can use @babel/preset-react. Sample .babelrc.json:

{
  "presets": [
    [
      "@babel/preset-react",
      {
        "runtime": "automatic",
        "importSource": "static-jsx"
      }
    ]
  ]
}

See examples/babel for an example.

TypeScript

You can configure JSX in your tsconfig.json:

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

See examples/typescript for an example.

On nightly versions of TypeScript, using the nodenext module setting, you can use the automatic JSX transform to avoid having to import h and Fragment manually:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
    "jsxImportSource": "static-jsx"
  }
}

The reason why this only works on nightly versions of TypeScript is because the automatic JSX runtime is imported as static-jsx/jsx-runtime, which is only exposed using the exports field in package.json, and only the nodenext module option understands the exports field.

Deno

static-jsx supports TypeScript natively, allowing it to work well in Deno projects. There are several ways to configure JSX in Deno: for more details, refer to the manual section on JSX. A Deno-compatible CDN, such as esm.sh, can be used to consume the library.

One way is to configure the TypeScript compiler options in your configuration file (e.g. deno.json):

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
    "jsxImportSource": "https://esm.sh/static-jsx@alpha"
  }
}

Note that, at the time of writing (Deno version 1.17), you will need to provide an additional command-line argument to deno run and similar commands: --config deno.json.

Another way is to use the jsxImportSource pragma comment in each JSX file in your project:

/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/static-jsx@alpha */

// Your JSX/TSX here

Developer setup

To install dependencies and run the project tests, run the following commands in the project directory:

npm install
npm run build
npm test

Note that running the tests requires Node.js 16 or higher, due to use of the experimental loader API which was changed in Node.js 16. This does not affect using the library in lower versions of Node.js, which will work with any version that supports ES modules.

License

This is free software, released under the MIT license.

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