Create mutable DOM on the server-side for flexible imperative manipulation.
npm install @jeffmcmahan/server-domserver-dom makes it easy to do things like this:
const view = dom`<body><header>${primaryNav}</header> ...`
view.querySelector('#home-link').classList.add('active')Create a virtual DOM fragment as follows:
import {dom} from '@jeffmcmahan/server-dom'
const fragment = dom`<h1 class="title">Hello World!</h1>`Interact with the DOM using a browser-compatible API:
fragment.querySelector('.title').classList.add('blue')
console.log(fragment.outerHTML) // <h1 class="title blue">He...server-dom's core AstNode class implements a near-equivalent for all relevant DOM Node properties and methods. DOM NodeList and DOMString types are just native javascript equivalents.
childNodesclassListclassNamefirstChildidisConnectedlastChildnextSiblingnodeNamenodeTypeownerDocument(resolves to parent<html>node, if any)parentpreviousSiblingnodeValue
In general, attributes will remain undefined unless and until they are either specified in HTML or added by assignment.
append(node)classList.add(className)classList.contains(className)classList.remove(className)cloneNode([deep])insertBefore(node, referenceNode)querySelector(selector)†querySelectorAll(selector)†remove()removeChild(node)
† Selector support is currently limited to single tag names, ids, class names, and attributes; no descendants or other combinations (yet).
The DOM Node API does not provide for serialization to HTML, so these items have been added, using HTMLElement naming conventions:
innerHTMLouterHTML
server-dom doesn't know anything about SVG. It will treat it just like any other set of HTML5 elements, with one simple exception: an empty element within an <svg> must be explicitly closed with a forward slash before the left angle bracket, as shown:
<svg>
<path d="..." />
</svg>jsdom is huge and slow; cheerio is advertised to be 8 times faster. With its single-pass parser, server-dom is 5–7 times faster than cheerio.
As a basic benchmark, I took the massive HTML source of the cheerio project page at npm (425kb and ≈11,000 nodes) and after some warmup, I pass the HTML string to cheerio and to server-dom. I don't think statistical treatment is required to appreciate the difference:
| Project | Time |
|---|---|
| cheerio | ≈150ms |
| server-dom | ≈25ms |
jsdom installs ≈100 packages and cheerio installs ≈20. Server-dom has zero dependencies.
Both cheerio and jsdom are aiming at creating something far more like the real DOM environment than is required for server-side document generation and manipulation for purposes of producing good quality, valid HTML output. Scraping is altogether more demanding, and not something server-dom aims to handle.