cschmatzler
Turboprop - Toolkit to create accessible component libraries
Hey all!
There’s been a lot of conversation lately both around server/client-side interactivity and a bunch of component libraries popping up for Phoenix. That’s great - and if we’re honest, many of the components that are available for Phoenix are not fully accessible. It’s a hard problem to solve, with keyboard interaction, focus trapping, ARIA labeling and more to keep in mind.
Thankfully, it’s a mostly solved problem in the JavaScript world, with libraries like HeadlessUI, Radix and… Zag, which is a framework-agnostic library packing a bunch of state machines to build accessible components.
So I’ve gone on a mission to create some Phoenix hooks that wrap these state machines, and a handful (not nearly enough at the moment!) are ready to see the light of day.
Along the path, I realised that I want a way to easily write different variants for my components, and, given that overrides are needed, also intelligently merge Tailwind classes to avoid conflicts.
So, this small idea turned into a whole toolkit that offers accessibility-enabling hooks, a variant API and Tailwind class merging utilities.
It’s called Turboprop, it’s still extremely early with especially the hooks API probably changing a lot in the near future, but I’m excited for it, so it’s time to share it!
https://github.com/leuchtturm-dev/turboprop
Here’s a bunch of examples:
Variants
@variants %{
variants: %{
variant: %{
default: "bg-primary text-primary-foreground shadow hover:bg-primary/90",
destructive: "bg-destructive text-destructive-foreground shadow-sm hover:bg-destructive/90",
outline: "border border-input bg-background shadow-sm hover:bg-accent hover:text-accent-foreground",
secondary: "bg-secondary text-secondary-foreground shadow-sm hover:bg-secondary/80",
ghost: "hover:bg-accent hover:text-accent-foreground",
link: "text-primary underline-offset-4 hover:underline",
},
size: %{
default: "h-9 px-4 py-2",
sm: "h-8 rounded-md px-3 text-xs",
lg: "h-10 rounded-md px-8",
icon: "h-9 w-9",
},
},
}
variant(@variants, variant: "destructive", size: "sm")
"bg-destructive text-destructive-foreground shadow-sm hover:bg-destructive/90 h-8 rounded-md px-3 text-xs"
Merge
merge(["px-2 py-1 bg-red hover:bg-dark-red", "p-3 bg-[#B91C1C]"])
"hover:bg-dark-red p-3 bg-[#B91C1C]"
Hooks
<div {dialog()}>
<button
class="rounded-md bg-blue-500 px-3 py-1.5 text-sm text-white shadow-sm hover:bg-blue-400 focus-visible:outline focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:outline-blue-500"
{dialog_trigger()}
>
Open dialog
</button>
<div class="absolute inset-0 w-full h-full bg-gray-200" {dialog_backdrop()}></div>
<div class="fixed inset-0 z-10 w-screen overflow-y-auto flex min-h-full items-center justify-center p-4" {dialog_positioner()}>
<div class="w-full max-w-md rounded-xl bg-white p-6 outline-0" {dialog_content()}>
<h2 class="text-base font-medium" {dialog_title()}>Dialog</h2>
<span class="mt-2 text-sm" {dialog_description()}>Welcome!</span>
<div class="mt-4">
<button
class="rounded-md bg-blue-500 px-3 py-1.5 text-sm text-white shadow-sm hover:bg-blue-400 focus-visible:outline focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:outline-blue-500"
{dialog_close_trigger()}
>
Close
</button>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
I’ll be adding a bunch more hooks in the future, probably revisiting the hooks API and options, documentation is a work in progress as always… The entire thing is less than two weeks old, so it’ll be a bit before we’re reaching 1.0!
Let me know if there’s a hook you really want to see next, or if something is desperately missing in the documentation, or just let me know you’re gonna use this in your projects!
Maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a component library from me as well soon.
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First 10 of 26 Posts!
03juan
Very nice idea to incorporate Zag like this. Will definitely take a look soon and give some feedback.
Have you had a look at @zachdaniel’s library? zachdaniel/tails: Utilities for working with tailwind classes, like semantic merge, and conditional class lists. (github.com) He describes a method to share themes between the tailwind compiler and Elixir.
cschmatzler
Hey! Thanks for having a look.
I actually didn’t know about Tails, so it’s nice to see some alternatives around.
Merge is definitely the tool in this library that has gotten the least love, and I have a few scratchpad ideas on how to incorporate configuration, especially with colors, sizes and so on. Will definitely require a bit of experimenting to get it the way I’d like to.
Other than that, I took the freedom of running a few tests against Tails and it gets a few things wrong that Turboprop gets right:
Tails.classes(["touch-pan-x", "touch-pan-y", "touch-pinch-zoom"])results intouch-pinch-zoomwhen they are actually allowed to be combined.Tails.classes(["normal-nums", "tabular-nums", "diagonal-fractions"])returns"normal-nums tabular-nums diagonal-fractions"wherenormal-numsandtabular-numsconflict.Tails.classes(["-top-12", "-top-2000"])returns-top-12 -top-2000.Tails.classes("[&[data-open]]:underline [&[data-open]]:line-through")returns both classes when it should not.Not to discredit Zach’s work of course, I’d love to push each other with this to create better stuff
zachdaniel
Nice, thanks for pointing out these bugs
Will take a look at addressing them. EDIT: do you have the tests you ran somewhere available? Would be nice to use those to fix it 
cschmatzler
Copied
merge_test.exsfrom my repo and ran%s/merge(/Tails.classes(/zachdaniel
Do you mind if I just copy this into my project? With proper attribution of course
cschmatzler
Mine already has attribution because I just copied it from tailwind-merge and translated it to Elixir, so go ahead, but please just attribute it to their maintainers instead of me
zachdaniel
The caching approach is interesting, my original focus on
Tailswas to compile the merger so that it was fast and stateless, would be very curious to see if the caching approach behaves better, although to properly benchmark against eachother would probably need to heat up the cache or somethingzachdaniel
To be clear, that isn’t like a challenge or anything, I never benchmarked Tails myself. I threw it together because I needed it for some very specific work, and announced it as a project others could use/contribute to, but I’ve been confident that someone would either come along and improve it or make a better thing
zachdaniel
Didn’t even know you could do this:
[paint-order:markers] [paint-order:normal], and that definitely breaks given that I didn’t write a tokenizer. In two places its usingString.split(":")to split variants which is naturally quite problematic.cschmatzler
Yeah, there’s some really funky stuff you can do with Tailwind and supporting it all isn’t trivial. That’s why I did write a parser for it
I mean, these are valid classes, what the hell:
Also, not taking it as a challenge! There’s some really slow stuff in this library (count the map merges in
ClassTree.generate/0and it will haunt you in your dreams), which is why I also added the cache in front of it. The good thing is that basically every application has a finite amount of class combinations, so slowness doesn’t matter as much with a cache. Definitely still a thing I want to overhaul before calling this stable and usable.Last Post!
03juan
Yeah, sad to see it go but I assume it was becoming quite a burden to maintain. And now that tailwindcss v4 is out it probably would’ve been an even bigger headache.
Does anyone have any alternatives?