are fragments worth keeping?

fragments is a feature that’s “neat” but i have personally never used or felt a need for.

since its implementation is non-trivial and must hook into internal functions it must be present in every build. this incurs perf overhead, code size and added complexity.

its benefits are but a few:

• a shallower dom in a few cases
• optimizing re-rendering of some adjacent subset of sibling nodes.
• allowing components that do not define their own root/wrapper. this is technically possible anyways by passing through whatever’s needed to the child component via opts:

function Parent() {
  return function() {
    return el("section", [
      vw(Child, null, null, {wrap: "p.foo"});
    ]);
  }
}

function Child(vm, model, key, opts) {
  return function() {
    return el(opts.wrap, "Hello World!");
  }
}

need to bench the perf gains and code size reduction from removing fragments.

[leeoniya]

the only legal HTML I can emit (without restructuring the data into groups) involves putting every row into a tbody which is unnecessary bloat and semantically incorrect.

i would actually argue that semantically it is correct, with every record being a tbody.

there is a way to make the html both, legal and semantic. if each row does in fact represent a record or single entity, then a table is just one of many presentational rendering options. rather than using a table you can use .records and .record with css display: table and display: table-row. you can do this using divs that have their css set to the appropriate presentational layout. by using divs, you now can have legal html by having both be adjacent without violating any html rules.

i’ve done the same in the past, and it works well when you need to collapse your “table” into a vertical non-table for mobile presentation within media queries. each table/tbody/tr/td has a specific css display type you can assign to arbitrary elements.

[leeoniya]

i guess the validators are too simplistic 😒

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/tbody