skatejs

Skate

Skate is high level, functional abstraction over the web component specs that:

• Produces cross-framework compatible components
• Abstracts away common attribute / property semantics via props, such as attribute reflection and coercion
• Adds several lifecycle callbacks for responding to prop updates, rendering and more
• Uses Preact, by default but also supports custom renderers

HTML

<x-hello name="Bob"></x-hello>

JavaScript

import { Component, h, propString } from 'skatejs';

customElements.define('x-hello', class extends Component {
  static props = {
    name: propString
  }
  renderCallback ({ name }) {
    return h('span', `Hello, ${name}!`);
  }
});

Result

<x-hello name="Bob">
  #shadow-root
    <span>Hello, Bob!</span>
</x-hello>

Whenever you change the name property - or attribute - the component will re-render, only changing the part of the DOM that requires updating.

Installing

There's a couple ways to consume Skate.

NPM

npm install skatejs

Skate exports a UMD build in umd/ so you can:

import * as skate from 'skatejs';

Script Tag

<script src="https://unpkg.com/skatejs/umd/skatejs.min.js"></script>

Since Skate exports a UMD definition, you can then access it via the global:

const { skate } = window;

Dependencies

Skate doesn't require you provide any external dependencies, but recommends you provide some web component polyfills depending on what browsers you require support for. Skate requires both Custom Elements and Shadow DOM v1.

To get up and running quickly with our recommended configuration, we've created a single package called skatejs-web-components where all you have to do is load it before your definitions.

npm install skatejs @skatejs/web-components

And then load it up before everything else:

import 'skatejs-web-components';
import { Component } from 'skatejs';

Or you can use script tags:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/@skatejs/web-components/umd/@skatejs/web-components.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/skatejs/umd/skatejs.min.js"></script>

If you want finer grained control about which polyfills you use, you'll have to BYO Custom Element and Shadow DOM polyfills.

Transpilation and native custom element gotchas

If you’re using Babel or some other tool to transpile to ES5, simply import @skatejs/web-components (or selectively include the polyfills) as needed and ignore the following.

Native custom element support requires that you load a shim if you're not delivering native ES2015 classes to the browser. If you're transpiling to ES5, you must - at the very least - load the native shim. More information can be found in the webcomponents/custom-elements repo.

When you load Skate by module name (import { ... } from 'skatejs'; or require('skatejs');), you'll be getting the transpiled source. Thus, even if you author your components in ES2015, you'll still be getting ES5 base-classes and the native custom elements implementation will complain.

If you want to deliver native classes, you can configure Webpack to pull in a version of Skate that's been transpiled to the latest ES specification. More about this approach is detailed in this blog post.

Browser Support

Skate supports all evergreens and IE11. We recommend using the following polyfills:

• Custom Elements: https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements
• Shadow DOM: https://github.com/webcomponents/shadydom
• Shadow DOM CSS fills: https://github.com/webcomponents/shadycss

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