@prairielearn/html

Utilities for easily rendering HTML from within JavaScript.

Usage

The html tagged template literal can be used to render HTML while ensuring that any interpolated values are properly escaped.

By convention, HTML templates are located in *.html.tmpl.js files.

// Hello.html.tmpl.js
const { hmtl } = require('@prairielearn/html');

module.exports.Hello = function Hello({ name }) {
  return html`<div>Hello, ${name}!</div>`;
};

This can then be used to render a string:

const { Hello } = require('./Hello');

console.log(Hello({ name: 'Anjali' }).toString());
// Prints "<div>Hello, Anjali!</div>"

Using escaped HTML

If you want to pre-escape some HTML, you can wrap it in escapeHtml to avoid escaping it twice. This is useful if you want to inline some HTML into an attribute, for instance with a Bootstrap popover.

const { html, escapeHtml } = require('@prairielearn/html');

console.log(html`
  <button data-bs-toggle="popover" data-bs-content="${escapeHtml(html`<div>Content here</div>`)}">
    Open popover
  </button>
`);

Why not EJS?

PrairieLearn used (and still uses) EJS to render most views. However, using a tagged template literal and pure JavaScript to render views has a number of advantages:

• Prettier will automatically format the content of any html tagged template literal; EJS does not have any automatic formatters.
• Authoring views in pure JavaScript allows for easier and more explicit composition of components.
• It's possible to use ESLint and TypeScript to type-check JavaScript views; EJS does not offer support for either.

If you want to use existing EJS partials inside of an html tagged template literal, check out the @prairielearn/html-ejs package. EJS-related functionality is deliberately located in a separate package so that @prairielearn/html can be used in the browser, since the ejs package makes use of Node-only features.