Export createDOMComponentClass()

[petehunt]

On IRC today someone was missing a tag in ReactDOM. Should we export createDOMComponent() as an escape hatch?

[fabiomcosta]

I agree this should be available and documented.

[vjeux]

👍

[radebrecht]

+1 to that. At the moment adding the missing svg tags is a bit pokey.

[zpao]

FWIW, this won't help the JSX transformer which maintains it's own list of tags it recognizes and converts to React.DOM.*

[sverrejoh]

@zpao I'm sure the custom DOM nodes can be imported into the local scope, so when JSX converts them (like it does with React components), it will just work.

In addition to SVG tags (which can all be supported by React eventually) there is also custom tags needed by legacy code, or proprietary systems. This is tags that will never be a part of React, and the only obvious alternative now (beside patching React) is to use dangerouslySetInnerHTML, which is a little tedious.

So I'd be all for having a clean way to expand the supported DOM nodes with something like createDOMComponent.

[zpao]

@sverrejoh As somebody who works on React, I'm saying that merely exposing this function doesn't add the tags to the JSX list. So if you want to be able to run jsx on your code and have new tags be converted to React.DOM.newtag then we need to do more.

React: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/src/core/ReactDOM.js
JSX: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/vendor/fbtransform/transforms/xjs.js

[cemerick]

There's two separate issues here: allowing people to easily produce components corresponding to nonstandard tags, and making it so that jsx knows about such things for a given project/codebase.

As someone that doesn't use jsx (and likely never will), addressing the former by simply exporting createDOMComponentClass would be a big immediate win for me, and may be for others in the same position as well. The latter issue is surely more challenging, but can be tackled later if deemed worthwhile.

[syranide]

@zpao @petehunt @sebmarkbage While I imagine 0.12 will make this happen, it does not address the issue of related attributes/properties that wouldn't be whitelisted right?

[sebmarkbage]

Correct, we'll get there for attributes too though.

[zpao]

At this point I think it's safe to say we'll never do this.