Are you interested in using lit-html or LitElement for your next project? If so, this article will provide you with a basic understanding of what lit-html & LitElement is and how it can be used for your next project. Let’s dive right into it!
So what exactly is lit-html?
Lit-html is a Google product. It can be defined as an HTML templating library for JavaScript. You can use it as a standalone library, even though it’s also part of a component library, which provides capabilities beyond lit-html with will be mentioned when we talk about LitElement.
This templating library allows you to reuse and define placeholders that contain particular values. There are two parts of the template, this includes both static and dynamic content. Keeping this in mind, it can speed up the development process with quick updates, and faster load times by using JavaScript in your markup. In the most basic form, that is what lit-html is and what it does. But what about LitElement?
What is the difference between lit-html and LitElement?
Lit-html as mentioned earlier is the HTML templating library, whereas LitElement is the lightweight web component base class. LitElement is using the lit-html framework to power its lightweight components. You can use LitElement as the base for building your web components, which is why we at Skhemata have used this framework in particular with the building of our modular web components. A great trait of LitElement is that it can be used with any front end library/framework. In our instance, we are using Bulma CSS for the UI framework.
Using LitElement
Just like the Skhemata components, this lightweight framework uses object-oriented programming. This programming paradigm allows you to reuse the code anywhere in your application, so you do not have to rebuild the same code. This allows for easier maintenance of code and applications.
Here’s how it works. Once you declare the static properties and create a render method that returns a template, you can define the component which will allow you to reuse the code.
Maybe using either LitElement and lit-html will be a good choice for your next project. If you are considering using either one of these frameworks, you may want to browse through the different components offered by Skhemata instead of building such features from scratch. The web components can be used with any framework, CMS, website builder, etc, to make your life easier.