JSDON

 

^{Social Media Photo by Reign Abarintos on Unsplash}

A DOM de/serializer based on LinkeDOM idea and the JSDON specification ^{_{(which is something I've just made up)}}.

Why

I like the idea we can represent the DOM linearly, and we can travel via postMessage or any other capable JSON PL anything we like, simplifying diffing, when needed, updates, changes, and so on.

This module just provides the basics to transform back and forward any document as JSON, enabling new ways to deal with Web pages, SVG images, or XML documents.

JavaScript DOM Object Notation

This notation considers two kinds of representations, plus one:

a leaf is a node* that cannot contain anything else
a branch is a node* that can contain either branches or leafs
a tree is a branch extension that represents a whole document*

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A leaf is represented by its type, and at least one, or more, string values, representing data the leaf carries with it.

``js
// attribute node
[2,"name"]
[2,"name","value"]

// text node
[3,"content"]

// comment node
[8,"content"]

// document type node (either html or svg)
[10,"html"]
`

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A branch is represented by its type, followed by zero, one, or more leafs, or branches. A branch has a delimiter too, but multiple delimiters get merged as summary of their value.

`js
// element
//

// fragment
[11,3,"text",-1]
`

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A tree is just a branch, but it starts with a document type, and it returns a new document.

`js
// most basic document with no doctype
[9,-1]

// most basic html with a
[9,10,"html",-1]

// most basic html with a doctype and an html node
//
[9,10,"html",1,"html",2,"lang","en",-2]
`

How To

// restore either JSON string form array or array itself
const doc = fromJSON(array);
`

This module makes it possible to shrink HTML into a linear, stream-able, representation of the tree, linearized via linkedom logic, to transport any kind of layout without extra bloat, also preserving Custom Elements builtin extends.

API

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By default, it puts in the output every node as is, but if there is a filter callback, each node passes through such callback and, if it returns false, such node won't be added to the final output.

A common use case could be avoiding empty text nodes:
`js
toJSON(document, node => {
if (
node.nodeType === node.TEXT_NODE &&
node.textContent.trim().length === 0
) {
// drop all unnecessary empty text nodes
return false;
}
// accepts all others
return true;
});
`

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The value can be either a string, that will be parsed via JSON.parse, or an array representing serialized markup.

The extra, optional, document parameter, is to let environments not running within a browser provide their own document, assuming this also has a defaultView property that exposes a DOMParser` global, so that it's possible to create new HTML, SVG, or even XML, documents with it.

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* ELEMENT_NODE
* ATTRIBUTE_NODE
* TEXT_NODE
* COMMENT_NODE
* DOCUMENT_NODE
* DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE
* DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE