Security News
CVE Volume Surges Past 48,000 in 2025 as WordPress Plugin Ecosystem Drives Growth
CVE disclosures hit a record 48,185 in 2025, driven largely by vulnerabilities in third-party WordPress plugins.
By Sarah Gooding - Jan 09, 2026
basicHTML
📣 Announcement
Be aware there is a shiny new module called LinkeDOM which is completely different, but better than basicHTML, at pretty much everything.
All modules of mine are going to use linkedom instead, and basicHTML will be soon deprecated or put in maintainance mode.
Feel free to read the related post to know more about this decision.
A NodeJS based, standard oriented, HTML implementation.
Breaking V2 Changes
As the canvas module brought in ~100MB of dependency, and as it's not even a common use case, I've decided to move the canvas package into devDependencies, so that you need to explicitly include it when you use basicHTML.
npm i basichtml canvas
By default, no canvas module will be installed at all.
New in v1
Introduced optional node-canvas dependency behind the <canvas> and <img> scene 🦄
- automatic fallback if the
canvasmodule doesn't build - provide canvas 2d API, with the ability to create real images
- provide the
node-canvasImage ability to react onloadanderrorevents
const {Image, document} = require('basichtml').init({});
const canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
canvas.width = 320;
canvas.height = 200;
const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
ctx.moveTo(0, 0);
ctx.lineTo(320, 200);
ctx.stroke();
const img = new Image();
img.onload = () => {
console.log(img.outerHTML);
};
img.src = canvas.toDataURL();
New in 0.23
Custom Elements built-in extends are finally supported 🎉
customElements.define('my-special-thing', MySpecialThing, {extends: 'div'});
document.createElement('div', {is: 'my-special-thing'});
New init(...) in 0.13
// easy way, introduced in 0.13
// pollutes by default the global with:
// - window
// - document
// - customElements
// - HTMLElement
// if a non global window is provided
// it will use it as defaultView
require('basichtml').init({
// all properties are optional
window: global,
// in case you'd like to share a predefined
// registry of Custom Elements
customElements,
// specify a different selector
selector: {
// use the module sizzle, it will be required
// automatically
name: 'sizzle',
// or alternatively, use a module function
module() {
return require('sizzle');
},
// how to retrieve results => querySelectorAll
$(Sizzle, element, css) {
return Sizzle(css, element);
}
}
});
// returns the window itself
Good old way to init with basic selectors
const {Document} = require('basichtml');
const document = new Document();
// attributes
document.documentElement.setAttribute('lang', 'en');
// common accessors
document.documentElement.innerHTML = `
<head></head>
<body></body>
`;
document.body.textContent = 'Hello basicHTML';
// basic querySelector / querySelectorAll
document.querySelector('head').appendChild(
document.createElement('title')
).textContent = 'HTML on NodeJS';
// toString() necessary to read, it's a Buffer
console.log(document.toString());
Above log will produce an output like the following one.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head><title>HTML on NodeJS</title></head>
<body>Hello basicHTML</body>
</html>
Features
- create any amount of documents
- document fragments, comments, text nodes, and elements
- elements have classList and dataset too
- Event and CustomEvent through add/removeEventListener and dispatchEvent
- DOM Level 0 compatible events
- Attributes compatible with Custom Elements reactions
- arbitrary Custom Elements creation
- customizable selector engine
Current caveats / exceptions
- since
v0.2, the propertynodeNameis case-sensitive to make basicHTML compatible with XML projects too el.querySelectorAll(css)works withtagName,#id, or.className. You can use more complex selectors including 3rd party libraries such Sizzle, as shown in this test example.el.querySelector(css)is not optimized and will return just index0of the whole collection. However, selecting a lot is not the goal of this library.el.getElementsByTagNameas well asel.getElementsByClassNameandel.getElementsByIdare all available. The latter is the fastest one of the trio.- all collections are basically just arrays. You should use official DOM methods to mutate them. As example, do not ever
childNodes.push(new Node)'cause that's not what you could do on the DOM. The whole point here is to provide a Web like env, not to write defensive code for NodeJS or other non strictly Web environments. - most historical properties and standards are most likely not implemented
License
ISC License
Copyright (c) 2017, Andrea Giammarchi, @WebReflection
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY
AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM
LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE
OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
What is this about?
This is an essential implementation of most common HTML operations without the necessary bloat brought in by the entire HTML specification.
The ideal scenario is together with hyperHTML to be able to create DOM trees and objects capable of being updated, refreshed, related to any native component.
The perfect scenario would be to drive NativeScript components using a CustomElementRegistry like you would do on the Web for Custom Elements.
Please bear in mind this project is not aiming to become a fully standard compliant implementation of the whole WebIDL based specifications, there are other projects for that.
FAQs
A NodeJS based, standard oriented, HTML implementation.
The npm package basichtml receives a total of 175 weekly downloads. As such, basichtml popularity was classified as not popular.
We found that basichtml demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
Package last updated on 30 Jun 2021
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
Related posts
Security News
Insecure Agents Podcast: Certified Patches, Supply Chain Security, and AI Agents
Socket CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh joins Insecure Agents to discuss CVE remediation and why supply chain attacks require a different security approach.
By Sarah Gooding - Jan 08, 2026
Security News
Tailwind CSS Announces 75% Layoffs as LLMs Reshape OSS Business Models
Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineering team after revenue dropped 80%, as LLMs redirect traffic away from documentation where developers discover paid products.
By Sarah Gooding - Jan 08, 2026