tensai75 / crel

a small, simple, and fast DOM creation utility

What

a small, simple, and fast DOM creation utility

Why?

Writing HTML is stupid. It's slow, messy, and should not be done in JavaScript.

The best way to make DOM elements is via document.createElement, but making lots of DOM with it is tedious.

crel.js makes the process easier.

Inspiration was taken from https://github.com/joestelmach/laconic, but crel wont screw with your bad in-DOM event listeners, and is smaller, faster, etc...

Usage

Signature:

crel(tagName/dom element [, attributes, child1, child2, childN...])

where childN may be

• a DOM element,
• a string, which will be inserted as a textNode,
• null, which will be ignored, or
• an Array containing any of the above

For browserify:

npm i crel

var crel = require('crel');

For standard script tag style:

    <script src="crel.min.js"></script>

To make some DOM:

Example:

var element = crel('div',
    crel('h1', 'Crello World!'),
    crel('p', 'This is crel'),
    crel('input', {type: 'number'})
);

// Do something with 'element'

You can create attributes with dashes, or reserved keywords, but using strings for the objects keys:

crel('div', {'class':'thing', 'data-attribute':'majigger'});

You can pass an already available element to crel, and it will be the target of the attributes/child elements

crel(document.body,
    crel('h1', 'Page title')
)

You can assign child elements to variables during creation:

var button,
    wrapper = crel('div',
        button = crel('button')
    );

You could probably use crel to rearrange existing dom..

crel(someDiv,
    crel(someOtherDiv, anotherOne)
)

But don't.

Proxy support

If you are using crel in an environment that supports Proxies, you can also use the new API:

var crel = require('crel').proxy;

var element = crel.div(
    crel.h1('Crello World!'),
    crel.p('This is crel'),
    crel.input({type: 'number'})
);

Browser support

Crel works in everything (as far as I know), but of course...

IE SUPPORT

If you require this library to work in IE7, add the following after declaring crel.

var testDiv = document.createElement('div'),
    testLabel = document.createElement('label');

testDiv.setAttribute('class', 'a');
testDiv['className'] !== 'a' ? crel.attrMap['class'] = 'className':undefined;
testDiv.setAttribute('name','a');
testDiv['name'] !== 'a' ? crel.attrMap['name'] = function(element, value){
    element.id = value;
}:undefined;


testLabel.setAttribute('for', 'a');
testLabel['htmlFor'] !== 'a' ? crel.attrMap['for'] = 'htmlFor':undefined;

Goals

Easy to use

Tiny

less than 1K minified about 500 bytes gzipped

Fast

crel is fast. Depending on what browser you use, it is up there with straight document.createElement calls.

http://jsperf.com/dom-creation-libs/10

License

MIT