bits-and-pieces v0.0.2

Bits and Pieces: Components for thinking and un-thinking

This is a collection of installable components using LitElement with JavaScript.

These are visual and interactive techniques for cross-platform use.

... un-thinking and re-thinking ideas in a "tools for thought" way (eg. sinkhole of energy and ideas) but also part of a cyborg publishing strategy.

... This is an open-source personal project, contributions are welcome but not expected. :)

Key user stories and context

• As a writer I express ideas as documents language basis, hypertext authoring.
• As a designer I want to make better documents with inline components, annotations, hypermedia.
• As a developer I want to reuse components with npm-installable versions.

Thus, this repository is the thing which helps me go from "mere" hypertext which is "close to normal HTML" toward something which I think is "actually decent" hypermedia. 🤙

Goals, strategies

• Implement a basic design system; token sharing and a theming strategy; potential figma integration.
• Implement a component UI Guide with implementation notes and full demo.
• Implement typographic primitives; opinionated native-oriented defaults with system-ui
• Implement layout techniques; CSS flex and grid
• Implement inline "graphics for thought" (eg. Sparklines, "word sized" charts ala Tufte)

Tactics

• Assume MDX usage of all components.
• Stick with native ESM project setup — don't use a bundler or any optimization at all. (Those are package consumer concerns, eg. whereever your MDX renderer is.)

Development setup

If you want to develop this project, you'll git clone and install it locally:

git clone [this repo]
cd [this repo]
npm i

You'll also want to link the package locally since you won't be installing from a CDN or npm.

cd [some repo that uses this repo]
npm link ../[this repo]

Result: some repo that uses this repo should now be able to import locally during development.

Tip: If you have a web component defined in this repo like: export class MyElement extends LitElement { ... }

... we can then import it like import MyElement from [this repo].

When you are ready to publish your fork, do npm publish.

Originally this project was based on lit-starter-js package from the main Lit repo.

Previous docs

Testing

This sample modern-web.dev's @web/test-runner along with Mocha, Chai, and some related helpers for testing. See the modern-web.dev testing documentation for more information.

Tests can be run with the test script, which will run your tests against Lit's development mode (with more verbose errors) as well as against Lit's production mode:

npm test

For local testing during development, the test:dev:watch command will run your tests in Lit's development mode (with verbose errors) on every change to your source files:

npm test:watch 

Alternatively the test:prod and test:prod:watch commands will run your tests in Lit's production mode.

Dev Server

This project uses modern-web.dev's @web/dev-server for previewing the project without additional build steps. Web Dev Server handles resolving Node-style "bare" import specifiers, which aren't supported in browsers. It also automatically transpiles JavaScript and adds polyfills to support older browsers. See modern-web.dev's Web Dev Server documentation for more information.

To run the dev server and open the project in a new browser tab:

npm run serve

There is a development HTML file located at /dev/index.html that you can view at http://localhost:8000/dev/index.html. Note that this command will serve your code using Lit's development mode (with more verbose errors). To serve your code against Lit's production mode, use npm run serve:prod.

Editing

If you use VS Code, we highly reccomend the lit-plugin extension, which enables some extremely useful features for lit-html templates:

• Syntax highlighting
• Type-checking
• Code completion
• Hover-over docs
• Jump to definition
• Linting
• Quick Fixes

This project is setup to reccomend lit-plugin to VS Code users if they don't already have it installed.

Linting

Linting of JavaScript files is provided by ESLint. In addition, lit-analyzer is used to type-check and lint lit-html templates with the same engine and rules as lit-plugin.

The rules are mostly the recommended rules from each project, but some have been turned off to make LitElement usage easier. The recommended rules are pretty strict, so you may want to relax them by editing .eslintrc.json.

To lint the project run:

npm run lint

Formatting

Prettier is used for code formatting. It has been pre-configured according to the Lit's style. You can change this in .prettierrc.json.

Prettier has not been configured to run when commiting files, but this can be added with Husky and and pretty-quick. See the prettier.io site for instructions.

Docs: Component guide to usage

This project includes a simple website generated with the eleventy static site generator and the templates and pages in /docs-src. The site is generated to /docs and intended to be checked in so that GitHub pages can serve the site from /docs on the master branch.

To enable the site go to the GitHub settings and change the GitHub Pages "Source" setting to "master branch /docs folder".

To build the site, run:

npm run docs

To serve the site locally, run:

npm run docs:serve

To watch the site files, and re-build automatically, run:

npm run docs:watch

The site will usually be served at http://localhost:8000.

Bundling and minification

This starter project doesn't include any build-time optimizations like bundling or minification. We recommend publishing components as unoptimized JavaScript modules, and performing build-time optimizations at the application level. This gives build tools the best chance to deduplicate code, remove dead code, and so on.

For information on building application projects that include LitElement components, see Build for production on the LitElement site.

More information

See Get started on the Lit site for more information.