ESX as Template Literal Tag

^{_{EXPERIMENTAL ⚠}}

This project is based on TC39 discussions and it tokenizes JSX like written template literals through a unified ESXToken class.

Features / API

Free-form Components

Differently from JSX, or even ESX Babel transformer, components can be passed to the ESX factory utility, producing the expected resulting tokens.

import {ESX, Token} from '@ungap/esx';

// the factory function accepts an object
// that will be used to tokenize components
const esx = ESX({MyComponent});

esx`
  <div data-any="value">
    <MyComponent a="1" b=${2} />
  </div>
`;

function MyComponent(props, ...children) {
  // note: props doesn't need ${...props} (invalid JS)
  //       or ...${props} (ambiguous and unnecesary template chunks)
  //       because any value can be passed as interpolation
  return esx`
    <div ${props}>
      ${children}
    </div>
  `;
}

The main advangate of this approach is that ESX can survive both minification and serialization, beside allowing also lower-case components, namespaces, and so on, as long as the factory function receives an object with those keys:

import {ESX, Token} from '@ungap/esx';

const env = {['some:comp']: someComp};
const esx = ESX(env);

esx`
  <div data-any="value">
    <some:comp a="1" b=${2} />
  </div>
`;

function someComp(props, ...children) {}

Serialization

Differently from other solutions based either on DOM or callbacks, ESX is simply an intermediate representation of the template literal content.

Thanks to its simple and unified Token shape, it can be serialized as compact, yet readable, JSON, surviving cross realm or environment boundaries.

import {ESX, Token} from '@ungap/esx';
import {stringify, parse} from '@ungap/esx/json';

const environment = {A, B};
const esx = ESX(environment);

const program = esx`
  <A data-any="value">
    <B a="1" b=${2} />
  </A>
`;

// JSON.stringify(program, ...rest)
const str = stringify(program, ...rest);

// JSON.parse(str, ...rest)
const revived = parse(str, environment, ...rest);

function A() {}
function B() {}

The Token Struct

field	type	description
type	number	any of the Token types: Token.ATTRIBUTE, Token.COMPONENT, Token.ELEMENT, Token.FRAGMENT, Token.INTERPOLATION or Token.STATIC.
attributes	(attribute | interpolation)[]?	meaningful only for components or elements, it's an array of attributes and/or interpolations tokens.
children	(attribute | interpolation | token)[]?	meaningful only for components, elements or fragments, here referred as token, it's an array of static, interpolation, or token children.
dynamic	boolean	when true it means that future updates will change the token value with latest passed interpolation. interpolation and, optionally, attribute are the only one with dynamic equal true.
name	string	the attribute, component or element name, otherwise the string #fragment, #interpolation or #static.
value	unknown?	for an attribute, an interpolation, or a static token, it's the value it represents. It's always a string for non-dynamic attributes and static tokens, it could be anything else in other cases. element and fragment don't carry any value while component points at whatever reference was passed to the factory ESX(...) function to create the tag.

Performance

• transformer - the tokenizer takes less than 1ms to transform even complex templates, closing it to zero time to update the resulting structure
• memory - each unique template generates one and one only token, updating interpolations and values only when the same template is executed again. This procedure grants no extra memory or Garbage Collector pressure when the same template is reused multiple times, also weakly relating the template with its own tokens to keep the heap under control
• serialization - complex structures can still be serialized in less than 1ms and revived in even less than that
• size - once minified and compressed, the es.js file is around 990bytes while the json.js helper is around 590bytes

Extras

• self-closing - because ESX is fully inspired by JSX, and because it doesn't strictly represent neither XML nor HTML but it's closer to the former, <self-closing /> tags are always allowed for any kind of node
• short-closing - still inspired by JSX, any element can use the fragment shortcut to close itself. <any-element>...</> is perfectly allowed
• any interpolation - either attributes or children can contain Token.INTERPOLATION entries, without expecting a spread operation, or even an object. <el ${anyValue} />, as example,is a perfectly valid tokenized tree

TODOs / Help needed

• decide how to deal with types for TypeScript users / improve JSDoc TS at least around exported utilities.
• align the Babel transformer to provide the same uniqueness around tokens, so that each token is created once and only updates happen on demand.
• a VSCode compatible syntax highlighter to see ESX as Template Literal the same as ESX or JSX, with the invetibale ${} interpolation difference, yet exactly the same contraints and highlights JSX has.
• a library to showcase ESX, either upgrading udomsay to use this instead of the Babel transformer, or creating a variant of that library based on this project. Update latest udomsay is based on ESX 🥳

About ESX

The idea behind ESX is to have a general purpose representation of a tree through well defined tokens that can be understood, and consumed, by any library or framework.

What this module is

• provide a way to understand interpolations and components through an always same, well defined, crawable struct
• components can be global or scoped, as long as the factory created tag knows their name and can provide their values: const tag = ESX({MyComp, Array, any: specialCase})
• interpolations can be part of the attributes list or the children
• static parts within children are also well defined among other types: elements, fragments, components, interpolations
• tokens are unique and (virtually) immutable, but their interpolation values get synchronously updated on repeated calls of the same template

What this module is NOT

• a way to handle HTML specifications or create DOM related only solutions. The DOM and any HTML specs is fully ignored, including the names any element can have, or its attributes. @click, ?disabled, .setter, these are all valid attributes represented with their name, including literally any special char that is not a space
• a way to handle XML specifications or create XML related only solution. Similarly with the previous point, ESX is general purpose, and simple, by design