cschmatzler

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.

First 10 of 26 Posts! Switch mode

03juan

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

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:

  • Touch utilities are being removed when they shouldn’t.
    Tails.classes(["touch-pan-x", "touch-pan-y", "touch-pinch-zoom"]) results in touch-pinch-zoom when they are actually allowed to be combined.
  • It does not handle Font Variant Numeric classes correctly.
    Tails.classes(["normal-nums", "tabular-nums", "diagonal-fractions"]) returns "normal-nums tabular-nums diagonal-fractions" where normal-nums and tabular-nums conflict.
  • Negative values aren’t handled correctly.
    Tails.classes(["-top-12", "-top-2000"]) returns -top-12 -top-2000.
  • Arbitrary modifiers don’t seem to be supported.
    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 :slight_smile:

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

Nice, thanks for pointing out these bugs :slight_smile: 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 :slight_smile:

cschmatzler

cschmatzler

Copied merge_test.exs from my repo and ran %s/merge(/Tails.classes(/ :smiley:

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

Do you mind if I just copy this into my project? With proper attribution of course :slight_smile:

cschmatzler

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 :slight_smile:

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

The caching approach is interesting, my original focus on Tails was 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 something :slight_smile:

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

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 :slight_smile:

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

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 using String.split(":") to split variants which is naturally quite problematic.

cschmatzler

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 :smiley:
I mean, these are valid classes, what the hell:

      assert merge([
               "[&[data-foo][data-bar]:not([data-baz])]:nod:noa:[color:red]",
               "[&[data-foo][data-bar]:not([data-baz])]:noa:nod:[color:blue]"
             ]) == "[&[data-foo][data-bar]:not([data-baz])]:noa:nod:[color:blue]"

Also, not taking it as a challenge! There’s some really slow stuff in this library (count the map merges in ClassTree.generate/0 and 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

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?

Where Next?

Trending in Announcing Top

bluzky
You may know https://ui.shadcn.com/, a UI component library for React. I really love it’s design style and components. I’ve built some co...
385 14863 120
New
JesseHerrick
Hey, I’m Jesse and I’m the main contributor behind Dexter, a full-featured, lightning-fast Elixir LSP optimized for large codebases. It s...
New
shahryarjb
The Chelekom project is a library of Phoenix and LiveView components generated via Mix tasks to fit developer needs seamlessly. One of i...
New
jimsynz
Beam Bots (or just BB for short) is a framework for building fault-tolerant robotics applications in Elixir using familiar OTP patterns. ...
New
Damirados
Hello everyone. After busy few months I am happy to announce v0.1.0 of Emerge &amp; Solve. They are GUI (Emerge) and State management (S...
New
ausimian
Emily is an Elixir library that runs Nx computations on Apple’s MLX. Install it as the default Nx backend and Nx, defn, Axon, Nx.Serving,...
New
zachdaniel
Introducing AshStorage! Attachment and file management that slots directly into your resources :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: I had hope...
New

Other Trending Topics Top

type1fool
I just stumbled on a newly redesigned elixir-lang.org. :tada: It looks like @Software_Mansion did the work, and I think it is generally a...
New
akoutmos
@hugobarauna and I (Alex Koutmos) have been hard at work on writing a book on Nerves that takes you from simply blinking LEDs to building...
New
juhalehtonen
There has been a thread to discuss the Stack Overflow Developer Survey on this forum every year since 2018, so here’s yet another one for...
New
bjorng
We want to introduce a new native datatype to Erlang: native records. Although replacing all tuple records with native records is not our...
New
spammy
I’m looking to build a personal workflow to quickly deploy web applications written in elixir/phoenix, for local consumption (ie not on t...
New
yureehuh
Introduction Founded in 2017 by landscape ecologist and fire mitigation expert Harry Statter, Frontline developed the first fully integra...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement