TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/TinyJS

by synergy20 • 2 years ago

102 84 2 years ago

github.com

yu3zhou4• 2 years ago

Like jQuery but for 2024?

NetOpWibby2• 2 years ago

I dig it

wackget2• 2 years ago

That would just be jQuery.

tbeseda2• 2 years ago

Yep. jQuery 4.0 is in it's second beta[0] and seems to clock in at 27kB. And the "slim" version is <20kB.

[0] https://blog.jquery.com/2024/07/17/second-beta-of-jquery-4-0...

adhamsalama• 2 years ago

jQuery? What are you, five? We use jjQuey.

NetOpWibby2• 2 years ago

This README was generated by ChatGPT

Damn good README. Also, good library.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

Too wordy yet doesn’t even explain the tag part of the API. It just shows up in an example.

A readme should be more reference / show and less drivel.

EMM_386• 2 years ago

I do believe I've seen something like this under another name.

Using "$" to shorten JavaScript? That seems a lot like jQuery.

This README was generated by ChatGPT

You don't need AI to explain this one.

CSSer2• 2 years ago

That explains the pompous introductory tone. Ugh.

KTibow• 2 years ago

I think the point is to be a more lightweight version, same spirit as HTMX

synergy202• 2 years ago

This is the whole code:

    (() => {
    const assignDeep = (elm, props) => Object.entries(props).forEach(([key, value]) =>
    typeof value === 'object' ? assignDeep(elm[key], value) : Object.assign(elm, {[key]: value}))

    const tagNames = ['a', 'abbr', 'address', 'area', 'article', 'aside', 'audio', 'b', 'base', 'bdi', 'bdo', 'blockquote', 'body', 'br', 'button', 'canvas', 'caption',     'cite', 'code', 'col', 'colgroup', 'data', 'datalist', 'dd', 'del',     'details', 'dfn', 'dialog', 'div', 'dl', 'dt', 'em', 'embed', 'fieldset',     'figcaption', 'figure', 'footer', 'form', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5',     'h6', 'head', 'header', 'hr', 'html', 'i', 'iframe', 'img', 'input', 'ins',    'kbd', 'label', 'legend', 'li', 'link', 'main', 'map', 'mark', 'meta',     'meter', 'nav', 'noscript', 'object', 'ol', 'optgroup', 'option', 'output',     'p', 'param', 'picture', 'pre', 'progress', 'q', 'rp', 'rt', 'ruby', 's',     'samp', 'script', 'section', 'select', 'small', 'source', 'span', 'strong',     'style', 'sub', 'summary', 'sup', 'table', 'tbody', 'td', 'template',     'textarea', 'tfoot', 'th', 'thead', 'time', 'title', 'tr', 'track', 'u',     'ul', 'var', 'video', 'wbr'  ].forEach(tag => window[tag] = function(...args) { 
    const props = typeof args[0] == 'object' && !(args[0] instanceof HTMLElement) ? args.shift() : null
    const elm = document.createElement(tag)
    props && assignDeep(elm, props)
    elm.append(...args.map(a => typeof a == 'string' ? document.createTextNode(a) : a))
    return elm
    })
    window['$'] = selector => document.querySelector(selector)
    window['$$'] = selector => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(selector))

})()

synergy202• 2 years ago

    window['$'] = selector => document.querySelector(selector)
    window['$$'] = selector => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(selector))

is really what I want to have

iudqnolq2• 2 years ago

I'm quite fond of a little helper like so:

    createElement({
        className: 'p-2 flex justify-end',
        contents: createElement({
          tag: 'img',
          src: '/os-logo-maps.svg'
        }),
      });

I got the idea from Lea Verou's blissfuljs. When you're creating a bunch of nested elements it comes in handy.

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

What's the point of the rest of the code? Looks useless.

jazzypants• 2 years ago

Why do you pollute the global scope with all this crap? It's 2024, dude. Just make an ESM module.

123yawaworht456• 2 years ago

may I ask what's the point of `const tagNames =`? removing it would make no difference, as far as I can tell - just make sure the previous line ends with a semicolon (or add it at the same line as the opening square bracket)

hoten• 2 years ago

Well, it's polluting the global window scope with all those helpers.

That's a reason to never use this imo.

There are plenty of other jquery-lite helper libraries out there. 95 percent the utility with hardly any cost in terms of script size.

Converting querySelectorAll to an array is honestly most of the benefit of these libraries.

spankalee• 2 years ago

Converting querySelectorAll to an array is honestly most of the benefit of these libraries.

Now that NodeList is iterable, I don't even know that converting to an array is that useful anymore.

[...document.querySelector('div')] is pretty easy.

Iterator.from(document.querySelector('div')) too (doesn't work yet in Safari).

xPaw• 2 years ago

You don't need to convert querySelectorAll to an array, you can directly iterate it, or use forEach.

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

Yes, exactly. The first two statements have no use in the last two lines that this library is for. Or may be I don't understand Javascript much.

alexjplant2• 2 years ago

jQuery II: The Quickening!

I recently built a toy Golang SSR project using Zepto, a jQuery-like library, and felt like I was 17 again (**EDIT: it's unmaintained - don't use it). Also of note is that "Highlander II" takes place in the year 2024 [1]. It's a sign! Everything old is new again! `$` is immortal!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_II:_The_Quickening

no_wizard• 2 years ago

Zepto is unmaintained, which isn’t good for security issues or bugs, unfortunately.

jQuery proper is both maintained and has actively been working on a 4.0 release and still gets security and bug fixes

alexjplant2• 2 years ago

Thanks for bringing this up. Edited my OP - there's no impression as such on their front page and it seemed fairly ergonomic. My bad on that one.

franciscop2• 2 years ago

I also created almost 10 years ago Umbrella JS, which is a tiny jQuery replacement but with more array-like arguments in the functions:

https://umbrellajs.com/

https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4184-replacing-jquery-110kb-wi...

luismedel• 2 years ago

IIRC, I used Zepto with Phonegap around ~2012. What a blast from the past.

"There can be only one"

CSSer2• 2 years ago

Calling those $ and $$ selector helper functions new is a bit disingenuous. They’ve been present as Chrome dev tools shortcuts for years. Let alone JQuery, I’ve also spent years seeing little articles about this neat trick on everything from medium to dev.to.

I recommend the author remove that or note inspiration from the README to avoid detracting from the rest of the work. I realize there’s more here than the traditional document.querySelector.bind(document) assignment.

wackget2• 2 years ago

I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

henriquez• 2 years ago

You didn’t need a library to do this. Just alias document.querySelector and document.querySelectorAll to something shorter. Polluting the global namespace with functions to document.createElement on every possible html tag is not a good idea.

tomp2• 2 years ago

Why would this make any sense?

    const myDiv = div(
      {id: 'container', className: 'my-class'}, 
      h1('Hello World'), 
      p('This is a dynamically generated paragraph.')
    );
    document.body.appendChild(myDiv);

That's completely unnecessary these days with template strings. It's gonna be much faster as well to use browser's native parsing.

    const div = document.createElement('div');
    let text = 'This is a dynamically generated paragraph';
    
    div.innerHTML = `
      <div id="container" class="my-class">
        <h1>Hello world</h1>
        <p>${text}</p>
      </div>
    `;
    document.body.append(...div.children);

Keep it simple!

franciscop2• 2 years ago

One big difference and why I've been experimenting with JSX[1] is that in that example, if the `text` comes from an untrusted source it can lead to XSS, which TinyJS prevents (I checked)!

[1] https://x.com/FPresencia/status/1838176000267452704

wruza• 2 years ago

Even if it comes from a trusted source, you usually want a good distinction between html interpolation and just-text chunks.

spullara• 2 years ago

you should probably worry about untrusted data in text and use a tagged template function that sanitizes its inputs for insertion in html.

nikeee• 2 years ago

You can use tagged template functions to escape `${text}`. The result is pretty close to lit-html [1].

[1] https://lit.dev/docs/v1/lit-html/introduction/

tomp2• 2 years ago

beautiful!

Nickersf• 2 years ago

This is exactly what I was thinking. I'm always trying to have fewer third-party dependencies in my codebase no matter how tiny, especially if it's solving problems that already have platform/system native solutions.

rikafurude21• 2 years ago

Makes sense to me, looks better. writing html strings like that is annoying

TimTheTinker3• 2 years ago

Generally, I would recommend avoiding directly setting the innerHTML property, since it's vulnerable to XSS and other injection attacks. If you do, make sure you HTML-escape each variable you interpolate.

Here's a way to do that with a tagged template function (named it `htmlFragment` to make it super clear what it's for):

    // a couple of functions to help
    
    const sanitizeHTML = (unsafeStr) => {
        const div = document.createElement('div');
        div.textContent = unsafeStr;
        return div.innerHTML;
    };
    
    const htmlFragment = (fragments, ...variables) => {
        const result = variables.map((variable, i) => fragments[i] + sanitizeHTML(variable));
        result.push(fragments[fragments.length-1]);
        return result.join('');
    };
    
    // updated your code here
    
    const div = document.createElement('div');
    let text = 'This is a dynamically generated paragraph';
    
    div.innerHTML = htmlFragment`
      <div id="container" class="my-class">
        <h1>Hello world</h1>
        <p>${text}</p>
      </div>
    `;
    document.body.append(...div.children);

Unfortunately, to my knowledge there isn't yet a close-to-the-metal solution for templating and data binding in HTML/JS, although several proposals are currently being discussed.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, to my knowledge there isn't yet a close-to-the-metal solution for templating and data binding in HTML/JS

I'm hoping for this one:

https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/1069

makingstuffs• 2 years ago

Would you not just be able to do the following:

    const div = document.createElement('div');
    const text = 'This is a dynamically generated paragraph';


    div.insertAdjacentHTML("beforeend", `<div id="container" class="my-class">
        <h1>Hello world</h1>
        <p>${text}</p>
      </div>`);

    document.body.append(...div.children);

Edit, figured I'd add the docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ins...

spencerchubb• 2 years ago

how would you add listeners if you were doing an html string? the first approach allows you to do something like this

``` const myButton = button({ onclick: e => console.log(e), textContent: "Click me" }) ```

TimTheTinker3• 2 years ago

Use topElement.querySelector('button'), then add the listener programmatically.

dpweb• 2 years ago

If ya don't want to do includes,

` window.$ = document.querySelector.bind(document) window.$$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document) `

qingcharles• 2 years ago

Thanks, this is the more useful bit of the code to me.

edit: how about this so you can use array functions too when you need?

window.$ = document.querySelector.bind(document);

window.$$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);

window.$$$ = (selector) => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(selector));

janalsncm• 2 years ago

I’ve been doing this for years. Lightweight but still saves me a ton of time.

mendyberger• 2 years ago

Code is actually tiny. Impressive!

You could make it even smaller by removing all the element names, and just have it be passed in as an argument. Would also reduce the amount of functions you need to declare, though function count is likely not a problem for modern JS engines.

Anyway, great job you did there!

emmanueloga_• 2 years ago

I use this:

    export const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document);
    export const $$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);

When using TypeScript the types for querySelectorAll are a bit hairy to map but by defining the consts like above the types "just work".

    for (const tag of $$<HTMLParagraphElement>("p")) ...

I don't use Array.from in the result of $$ because sometimes creating an Array is not necessary. The NodeList returned can be iterated directly or converted to an array later if really needed:

    [...$$("p")].map(p => ...)

Since I use TypeScript I lean on TSX for building HTML. I use preact's render-to-string package to convert it to a string [1].

---

1: https://github.com/preactjs/preact-render-to-string

cies3• 2 years ago

You're a wizzard!

JS keeps amazing me. It reminds me of Perl somehow. If Perl and Lua had a child, with some browsers APIs sprinkled on top.

jufitner• 2 years ago

Someone will fork this with proper ES modules and no window clobbering.

akira25016• 2 years ago

I've been using this for years:

    const $id = new Proxy({}, {
        // get element from cache, or from DOM
        get: (tgt, k, r) => (tgt[k] || ((r = document.getElementById(k)) && (tgt[k] = r))),
        
        // prevent programming errors
        set: () => $throw(`Attempt to overwrite id cache key!`)
    });

It's nice to be able to refer to elements by property name, so:

    <div id="thing"></div>

Is reachable with:

    $id.thing

And, since the underlying structure is just an object, you can still enumerate it with Object.keys, which can sometimes be a useful debugging aid and general catalog of accessed elements.

Anyways.. Proxy is a wildly underappreciated and used class in JavaScript.

nattaylor2• 2 years ago

If you like brittle things, the id attribute is already made into an attribute on the window for legacy reasons

Edit: My tone may have indicated that parent's solution was brittle. It's not!

akira25016• 2 years ago

The id attribute can take on values that are already present or reserved in window. "fetch", "opener", etc..

The reason to have a separate system that correctly calls getElementById() is to avoid this issue.

So, it's actually a _less_ brittle mechanism that doesn't rely on legacy mechanisms and lacks the surprises that come with that.

cies3• 2 years ago

Nah, i rather skip brittle :) But what's not brittle in JS? Elm? (TS to some extend)

open-paren• 2 years ago

Element IDs are automatically attached to the window object

  <script>
  document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
    window.thing.innerHTML = 'Hello, World!';
  });
  </script>
  <div id="thing"></div>

akira25016• 2 years ago

    <div id="parent"></div>

Whoops.

esprehn• 2 years ago

That's (much) slower and has surprising edge cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32997636

jonathrg• 2 years ago

Does caching help? If so, shouldn't getElementById do the same thing under the hood?

akira25016• 2 years ago

It used to more in the past.

The native call does usually include a cache and will use it optimistically; however, the strategies around invalidating this cache are varied and some surprisingly basic DOM actions can trigger it. Then browsers usually fallback to the full DOM query case.

The cache eliminates this variability, which prior to flexbox, could be very useful in highly nested site designs particularly in mobile contexts.

kibibu• 2 years ago

I also put together a Proxy microlib a few years ago. I agree it's very powerful.

You can use it like:

    $('.my-elements').className = 'Important'; 
    $('.my-elements').style.color = 'Red';     
    $('.my-elements').classList.add('Another'); 


    const $ = (() => {
        function listProxy(arr) {
            return new Proxy(arr, {
                set: (t, p, v, r) => {
                    for(let x of t) {
                        x[p] = v;
                    }
                },
                get: (t, p, r) => {
                    if(t.length > 0 && t[0][p] instanceof Function) {
                        return (...args) => { Array.prototype.map.call(t, (x) => x[p](args)) };
                    } else {
                        return listProxy( Array.prototype.map.call(t, (x) => x[p]) );
                    }
                }
            })
        }

        return (sel, root) => {
            if(root === undefined) root = document;
            return listProxy(root.querySelectorAll(sel));
        }
    })();

demo: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/RxGgNR

sli• 2 years ago

I built a Proxy-based microlib for making fluent REST calls just on a lark a couple years ago. It was never anything production-ready, but it was so handy that I used it in all of my JS projects until I moved away from webdev. The API was basically:

    const api = new Proxy({route: baseRoute}, handler); // handler is the microlib's export
    const result = await api.get.some.route.invoke();   // GET {baseRoute}/some/route

invoke() is just how it finally fires the call. I didn't feel like spending too much time making it automatic, the benefits just weren't large enough to justify compared to just calling invoke().

mattlondon• 2 years ago

Why cache? I expect that getElementById will be efficient enough on its own.

MrLeap• 2 years ago

This is awesome! Proxies can be so cool. I made this proxy many years ago for tracking stats/buffs/debuffs/gear for game things.

https://github.com/MrLeap/Statsi

o11c• 2 years ago

Should that be `Object.create(null)` to avoid problems with `<div id="toString"/>`?

akira25016• 2 years ago

A call to `$id.toString` actually yields the native unbound function whether or not there is such an element on the page. So get is not invoked in this case.

gvx• 2 years ago

With that name I'd expect a tiny implementation of JavaScript.

tbeseda2• 2 years ago

I was just reading about this https://porffor.dev

Porffor is a unique JS engine/compiler/runtime, compiling JS code to WebAssembly or native ahead-of-time.

dang• 2 years ago

Show HN: Tiny JS – A Tiny JavaScript Library for Easy DOM Creation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462817 - Sept 2024 (4 comments)

Show HN: A better way of writing HTML via JavaScript? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41451559 - Sept 2024 (9 comments)

im_nullable• 2 years ago

Based on the readme this is a subset of jQuery primarily targeted at creating dom nodes.

Kind of cool if this is what you need.

atum47• 2 years ago

Hi everyone, author here. Let me know if you have any questions.

SahAssar2• 2 years ago

The title ("TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$") seems to be about these two lines:

    window['$'] = selector => document.querySelector(selector)
    window['$$'] = selector => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(selector))

The other part is a small & naive (and I mean that in the best way) DOM abstraction.

I think the discussion here seems to be about one or the other, not the thing as a whole.

sublinear• 2 years ago

Sheer pollution. Never in anything I deploy to production.

coolThingsFirst• 2 years ago

Pls no, im tired boss

benabus• 2 years ago

I remember when we would throw this into our utilities.js scripts back in like 2007. We didn't have querySelector yet, though. We'd also walk to school with no shoes, in the snow, uphill, both ways.

gmac• 2 years ago

Reminds me of some simple tools I used years ago when CoffeeScript was big: https://github.com/jawj/affogato/blob/master/functions.coffe...

Nowadays I tend to use Mithril instead, because immediate-mode UI is so much less hassle than retained-mode: https://mithril.js.org/

1GZ0• 2 years ago

I wrote my first jQuery lite selector clone a bit ago, any feedback would be appreciated, especially since I don't see the need to separate out querySelector & querySelectorAll

``` const $ = (param) => { if (typeof param === "string" || param instanceof String) { const elm = document.querySelectorAll(param); return elm.length > 1 ? elm : document.querySelector(param); } else { return [param].length === 1 ? [param][0] : [param]; } }; ```

TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$

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