Tag: esm

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Original Releases

Releasing Color.js: A library that takes color seriously

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Related: Chris’ blog post for the release of Color.js

This post has been long overdue: Chris and I started working on Color.js in 2020, over 2 years ago! It was shortly after I had finished the Color lecture for the class I was teaching at MIT and I was appalled by the lack of color libraries that did the things I needed for the demos in my slides. I asked Chris, “Hey, what if we make a Color library? You will bring your Color Science knowledge and I will bring my JS and API design knowledge. Wouldn’t this be the coolest color library ever?”. There was also a fair bit of discussion in the CSS WG about a native Color object for the Web Platform, and we needed to play around with JS for a while before we could work on an API that would be baked into browsers.

We had a prototype ready in a few months and presented it to the CSS WG. People loved it and some started using it despite it not being “officially” released. There was even a library that used Color.js as a dependency!

Once we got some experience from this usage, we worked on a draft specification for a Color API for the Web. In July 2021 we presented it again in a CSS WG Color breakout and everyone agreed to incubate it in WICG, where it lives now.

Why can’t we just standardize the API in Color.js? While one is influenced by the other, a Web Platform API has different constraints and needs to follow more restricted design principles compared to a JS library, which can be more flexible. E.g. exotic properties (things like color.lch.l) are very common in JS libraries, but are now considered an antipattern in Web Platform APIs.

Work on Color.js as well as the Color API continued, on and off as time permitted, but no release. There were always things to do and bugs to fix before more eyes would look at it. Because eyes were looking at it anyway, we even slapped a big fat warning on the homepage:

Eventually a few days ago, I discovered that the Color.js package we had published on npm somehow has over 6000 downloads per week, nearly all of them direct. I would not bat an eyelid at those numbers if we had released Color.js into the wild, but for a library we actively avoided mentioning to anyone outside of standards groups, it was rather odd.

How did this happen? Maybe it was the HTTP 203 episode that mentioned it in passing? Regardless, it gave us hope that it’s filling a very real need in the pretty crowded space of color manipulation libraries and it gave us a push to finally get it out there.

So here we are, releasing Color.js into the wild. So what’s cool about it?

  • Completely color space agnostic, each Color object just has a reference to a color space, a list of coordinates,, and optionally an alpha.
  • Supports a large variety of color spaces including all color spaces from CSS Color 4, as well as the unofficial CSS Color HDR draft.
  • Supports interpolation as defined in CSS Color 4
  • Doesn’t skimp on color science: does actual gamut mapping instead of naïve clipping, and actual chromatic adaptation when converting between color spaces with different white points.
  • Multiple DeltaE methods for calculating color difference (2000, CMC, 76, Jz, OK etc)
  • The library itself is written to be very modular and ESM-first (with CJS and IIFE bundles) and provides a tree-shakeable API as well.

Enjoy: Color.js

There is also an entire (buggy, but usable) script in the website for realtime editable color demos that we call “Color Notebook”. It looks like this:

And you can create and share your own documents with live Color.js demos. You log in with GitHub and the app saves in GitHub Gists.

Color spaces presently supported by Color.js
Categories
Original Personal Releases

On Yak Shaving and <md-block>, a new HTML element for Markdown

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This week has been Yak Shaving Galore. It went a bit like this:

  1. I’ve been working on a web component that I need for the project I’m working on. More on that later, but let’s call it <x-foo> for now.
  2. Of course that needs to be developed as a separate reusable library and released as a separate open source project. No, this is not the titular component, this was only level 1 of my multi-level yak shaving… 🤦🏽‍♀️
  3. I wanted to showcase various usage examples of that component in its page, so I made another component for these demos: <x-foo-live>. This demo component would have markup with editable parts on one side and the live rendering on the other side.
  4. I wanted the editable parts to autosize as you type. Hey, I’ve written a library for that in the past, it’s called Stretchy!
  5. But Stretchy was not written in ESM, nor did it support Shadow DOM. I must rewrite Stretchy in ESM and support Shadow DOM first! Surely it won’t take more than a half hour, it’s a tiny library.
  6. (It took more than a half hour)
  7. Ok, now I have a nice lil’ module, but I also need to export IIFE as well, so that it’s compatible with Stretchy v1. Let’s switch to Rollup and npm scripts and ditch Gulp.
  8. Oh look, Stretchy’s CSS is still written in Sass, even though it doesn’t really need it now. Let’s rewrite it to use CSS variables, use PostCSS for nesting, and use conic-gradient() instead of inline SVG data URIs.
  9. Ok, Stretchy v2 is ready, now I need to update its docs. Oooh, it doesn’t have a README? I should add one. But I don’t want to duplicate content between the page and the README. Hmmm, if only…
  10. I know! I’ll make a web component for rendering both inline and remote Markdown! I have an unfinished one lying around somewhere, surely it won’t take more than a couple hours to finish it?
  11. (It took almost a day, two with docs, demos etc)
  12. Done! Here it is! https://md-block.verou.me
  13. Great! Now I can update Stretchy’s docs and release its v2
  14. Great! Now I can use Stretchy in my <x-foo-live> component demoing my <x-foo> component and be back to only one level of yak shaving!
  15. Wow, it’s already Friday afternoon?! 🤦🏽‍♀️😂

Hopefully you find <md-block> useful! Enjoy!

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Articles

Mass function overloading: why and how?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the things I’ve been doing for the past few months (on and off—more off than on TBH) is rewriting Bliss to use ESM 1. Since Bliss v1 was not using a modular architecture at all, this introduced some interesting challenges.

Continue reading “Mass function overloading: why and how?”
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Articles

The case for Weak Dependencies in JS

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Earlier today, I was briefly entertaining the idea of writing a library to wrap and enhance querySelectorAll in certain ways. I thought I’d rather not introduce a Parsel dependency out of the box, but only use it to parse selectors properly when it’s available, and use more crude regex when it’s not (which would cover most use cases for what I wanted to do).

In the olden days, where every library introduced a global, I could just do:

if (window.Parsel) {
	let ast = Parsel.parse();
	// rewrite selector properly, with AST
}
else {
	// crude regex replace
}

However, with ESM, there doesn’t seem to be a way to detect whether a module is imported, without actually importing it yourself.

I tweeted about this…

Continue reading “The case for Weak Dependencies in JS”
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Tips

Import non-ESM libraries in ES Modules, with client-side vanilla JS

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In case you haven’t heard, ECMAScript modules (ESM) are now supported everywhere!

While I do have some gripes with them, it’s too late for any of these things to change, so I’m embracing the good parts and have cautiously started using them in new projects. I do quite like that I can just use import statements and dynamic import() for dependencies with URLs right from my JS, without module loaders, extra <script> tags in my HTML, or hacks with dynamic <script> tags and load events (in fact, Bliss has had a helper for this very thing that I’ve used extensively in older projects). I love that I don’t need any libraries for this, and I can use it client-side, anywhere, even in my codepens.

Once you start using ESM, you realize that most libraries out there are not written in ESM, nor do they include ESM builds. Many are still using globals, and those that target Node.js use CommonJS (CJS). What can we do in that case? Unfortunately, ES Modules are not really designed with any import (pun intended) mechanism for these syntaxes, but, there are some strategies we could employ.

Continue reading “Import non-ESM libraries in ES Modules, with client-side vanilla JS”