KitaJS HTML
is a 0 dependencies, fast and concise HTML generator for JavaScript with JSX syntax.
Table of Contents
Installing
npm install @kitajs/html
Getting Started
Install @kitajs/html
with your favorite package manager, import it into the top of your jsx
/tsx
file and change your tsconfig.json to transpile jsx syntax.
{
"compilerOptions": {
"jsx": "react",
"jsxFactory": "html.createElement",
"jsxFragmentFactory": "html.Fragment"
}
}
import html from '@kitajs/html'
console.log(<div>Hello World</div>)
function route(request, response) {
return response
.header('Content-Type', 'text/html')
.send(<div>Hello World</div>)
}
fs.writeFileSync(
'index.html',
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>Hello World</div>
</body>
</html>
)
function Layout({ name, children }: html.PropsWithChildren<{ name: string }>) {
return (
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>Hello {name}</div>
{children}
</body>
</html>
)
}
console.log(<Layout name="World">I'm in the body!</Layout>)
typeof (<div>Hello World</div>) === 'string'
This package just provides functions to transpile JSX to a HTML string, you can imagine doing something like this before, but now with type checking and intellisense:
const html = `<div> Hello World!<div>` ❌
const html = <div>Hello World!<div> ✅
Sanitization
This package aims to be a HTML builder, not an HTML sanitizer. This means that no HTML content is escaped by default. However we provide a custom attribute called safe
that will sanitize everything inside of it. You can also use the exported html.escapeHtml
function to escape other contents arbitrarily.
<div style={'"&<>\''}></div> // <div style=""&<>'"></div>
<div style={{ backgroundColor: '"&<>\'' }}></div>
<div safe>{untrusted}</div> // <div><script>alert("hacked!")</script></div>
<div>{'<a></a>' + html.escapeHtml('<a></a>')}</div> // <div><a></a><a></a></div>
<div>{untrusted}</div> // <div><script>alert('hacked!')</script></div>
It's like if React's dangerouslySetInnerHTML
was enabled by default.
The safe attribute
You should always use the safe
attribute when you are rendering user input. This will sanitize its contents and avoid XSS attacks.
function UserCard({ name, description, date, about }) {
return (
<div class="card">
<h1 safe>{name}</h1>
<br />
<p safe>{description}</p>
<br />
// controlled input, no need to sanitize
<time datetime={date.toISOString()}>{date.toDateString()}</time>
<br />
<p safe>{about}</p>
</div>
)
}
Note that only at the very bottom of the HTML tree is where you should use the safe
attribute, to only escape where its needed.
👉 There's an open issue to integrate this within a typescript plugin to emit warnings and alerts to use the safe attribute everywhere a variable is used. Wanna help? Check this issue.
Migrating from HTML
Migrating from plain HTML to JSX can be a pain to convert it all manually, as you will find yourself hand placing quotes and closing void elements. Luckily for us, there's a tool called htmltojsx that can help us with that.
<div class="awesome" style="border: 1px solid red">
<label for="name">Enter your name: </label>
<input type="text" id="name" />
</div>
<p>Enter your HTML here</p>
Generates:
<>
{}
<div className="awesome" style={{ border: '1px solid red' }}>
<label htmlFor="name">Enter your name: </label>
<input type="text" id="name" />
</div>
<p>Enter your HTML here</p>
</>
Compiling html
When you have static html, is simple to get amazing performances, just save it to a constant and reuse it. However, if you need to hydrate the html with dynamic values in a super fast way, you can use the compile
property to compile the html and reuse it later.
import html from '@kitajs/html'
const compiled = html.compile<['param1', 'param2']>(
<div>
<div>$param1</div>
<div>$param2</div>
<div>$notFound</div>
</div>,
<MyComponent param1="$param1" param2="$param2" />
)
const html = compiled({ param1: 'Hello', param2: 'World!' })
This makes the html generation around 1500 times faster than just using normal jsx.
Variables that were not passed to the compile
function are ignored silently, this way you can reuse the result into another compile
function or just because the your "$val
" was supposed to be a static value.
Fragments
JSX does not allow multiple root elements, but you can use a fragment to group multiple elements:
const html = (
<>
<div>1</div>
<div>2</div>
</>
)
Learn more about JSX syntax here!
Supported HTML
All HTML elements and attributes should be supported.
Missing an element or attribute? Please create an issue or a PR to add it. It's easy to add.
The tag
tag
The <tag of="">
tag is a custom internal tag that allows you to render any runtime selected tag you want. Possibly reasons to prefer this tag over extending types:
- You want to render a tag that is chosen at runtime.
- You don't want to mess up with extending globally available types.
- You are writing javascript with typechecking enabled.
- You are writing a library and should not extend types globally.
- You need to use kebab-case tags, which JSX syntax does not support.
<tag of="asd" />
<tag of="my-custom-KEBAB" />
We do recommend using extending types instead, as it will give you intellisense and type checking.
Async Components
Sadly, we cannot allow async components in JSX and keep the same string type for everything else. Even though it should be possible to write async components you will have no real benefit from it, as you will always have to await the whole html generation
to complete before you can render it.
You should fetch async data in the following way:
async function render(name) {
const data = await api.data(name)
const otherData = await api.otherData(name)
return <Layout data={data} otherData={data} />
}
Extending types
Just as exemplified above, you may also want to add custom properties to your elements. You can do this by extending the JSX
namespace.
⚠️ Please follow the JSX convention and do not use kebab-case
for your properties, use camelCase
instead. We internally transform all camelCase
properties to kebab-case
to be compliant with the HTML and JSX standards.
declare global {
namespace JSX {
interface IntrinsicElements {
mathPower: HtmlTag & {
myExponential: number
children: number
}
}
interface HtmlTag {
hxBoost: boolean
}
}
}
const element = (
<mathPower myExponential={2} hxBoost>
{3}
</mathPower>
)
Performance
This package is just a string builder on steroids, as you can see how this works. However we are running a benchmark with an JSX HTML with about 10K characters to see how it performs.
You can run this yourself by running pnpm bench
.
@kitajs/html:
26 414 ops/s, ±0.87% | 99.93% slower
@kitajs/html - compiled:
35 267 972 ops/s, ±1.19% | fastest
typed-html:
9 827 ops/s, ±1.46% | slowest, 99.97% slower
How it works
This package just aims to be a drop in replacement syntax for JSX, and it works because you tell tsc to transpile JSX syntax to calls to our own html
namespace.
<ol start={2}>
{[1, 2].map((i) => (
<li>{i}</li>
))}
</ol>
Gets transpiled by tsc to plain javascript:
html.createElement(
'ol',
{ start: 2 },
[1, 2].map((i) => html.createElement('li', null, i))
)
Which, when called, returns this string:
'<ol start="2"><li>1</li><li>2</li></ol>'
Format HTML output
This package emits HTML as a compact string, useful for over the wire environments. However, if your use case really needs the output
HTML to be pretty printed, you can use an external JS library to do so, like html-prettify.
import html from '@kitajs/html'
import prettify from 'html-prettify'
const html = (
<div>
<div>1</div>
<div>2</div>
</div>
)
console.log(html)
console.log(prettify(html))
👉 There's an open PR to implement this feature natively, wanna work on it? Check this PR.
Fork credits
This repository was initially forked from typed-html and modified to add some features and increase performance.
Initial credits to nicojs and contributors for the amazing work.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.