We added domdiff to replace the DiffDOM library
here:
87f54d1e88
DiffDOM had updated its code to be written to the
ECMAScript 6 (ES6) standard and so needed extra
work to work with the older browsers in our
support matrix. This was recorded as an issue
here:
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/1443052/stories/165380360
Domdiff didn't work (see below for more details)
so this replaces it with the morphdom library.
Morphdom supports the same browsers as us and is
relied on by a range of large open source
projects:
https://github.com/patrick-steele-idem/morphdom#what-projects-are-using-morphdom
It was tricky to find alternatives to DiffDOM so
if we have to source alternatives in future, other
options could be:
- https://github.com/choojs/nanomorph
- https://diffhtml.org/index.html (using its
outerHTML method)
Why domdiff didn't work
Turns out that domdiff was replacing the page HTML
with the HTML from the AJAX response every time,
not just when they differed. This isn't a bug.
Domdiff is bare bones enough that it compares old
DOM nodes to new DOM nodes with ===. With our
code, this always results to false because our new
nodes are made from HTML strings from AJAX
response so are never the same node as the old
one.
Means our rollup bundling doesn't leave any
artefact files lying around that we'd then have to
deal with.
Also includes:
- removal of some JSHint config' marking the
artefacts as scripts to ignore
- use of streamqueue package to allow the same
ordering of scripts as before
It's not obvious how the code that includes JS
Modules in the frontend build works.
This adds lots of comments to explain the various
bits and flattens `modules/all.mjs` to just be a
single function that starts off the window.GOVUK
namespace.
Also removes `module/all.js` from the repo'. It's
an artefact used by the frontend build so
shouldn't be included as source code.
Means our rollup bundling doesn't leave any
artefact files lying around that we'd then have to
deal with.
Also includes:
- removal of some JSHint config' marking the
artefacts as scripts to ignore
- use of streamqueue package to allow the same
ordering of scripts as before
It's not obvious how the code that includes JS
Modules in the frontend build works.
This adds lots of comments to explain the various
bits and flattens `modules/all.mjs` to just be a
single function that starts off the window.GOVUK
namespace.
Also removes `module/all.js` from the repo'. It's
an artefact used by the frontend build so
shouldn't be included as source code.
Means our rollup bundling doesn't leave any
artefact files lying around that we'd then have to
deal with.
Also includes:
- removal of some JSHint config' marking the
artefacts as scripts to ignore
- use of streamqueue package to allow the same
ordering of scripts as before
It's not obvious how the code that includes JS
Modules in the frontend build works.
This adds lots of comments to explain the various
bits and flattens `modules/all.mjs` to just be a
single function that starts off the window.GOVUK
namespace.
Also removes `module/all.js` from the repo'. It's
an artefact used by the frontend build so
shouldn't be included as source code.