/ocfsvelte

A Svelte version of the OCF website, built for organization, accessibility, and speed.

Primary LanguageJavaScript

ocfsvelte

A Svelte version of the OCF website, built for organization, accessibility, and speed.

Project Goals

These are essentially the things that I think ocfstatic can improve on, in this order.

  • Organization & Clarity: Less walls of text, no "magic incantations" to get to certain places, subjectively better organization.
  • Accessibility (a11y): Follow WCAG 2.1 as closely as possible, use WAI-ARIA tags and semantic web tags (avoid div), and ask someone who uses a screen reader and other accessibility software for feedback.
  • Code Cleanliness: Split the frontend and the API so it's easier to reason with.
  • Speed: Ensure that we get 100 on Lighthouse, pngcrush all PNGs, svgo all SVGs. Don't spend too much time optimizing code (neccesarily), just the common sense basics.

How To

Development

cd ocfsvelte
npm install
npm run dev # live reload server

Bundler config

ocfsvelte uses Rollup to provide code-splitting and dynamic imports, as well as compiling your Svelte components. As long as you don't do anything daft, you can edit the configuration files to add whatever plugins you'd like.

Deployment

Just run npm run export and copy the contents of __sapper__/export folder to a webserver.

External Components

When using Svelte components installed from npm, such as @sveltejs/svelte-virtual-list, Svelte needs the original component source (rather than any precompiled JavaScript that ships with the component). This allows the component to be rendered server-side, and also keeps your client-side app smaller.

Because of that, it's essential that the bundler doesn't treat the package as an external dependency. You can either modify the external option under server in rollup.config.js or the externals option in webpack.config.js, or simply install the package to devDependencies rather than dependencies, which will cause it to get bundled (and therefore compiled) with your app:

npm install -D @sveltejs/svelte-virtual-list

Repository Structure

Sapper expects to find two directories in the root of your project — src and static.

src

The src directory contains the entry points for ocfsvelte — client.js, server.js and (optionally) a service-worker.js — along with a template.html file and a routes directory.

src/routes

This is the heart of your Sapper app. There are two kinds of routes — pages, and server routes.

Pages are Svelte components written in .svelte files. When a user first visits the application, they will be served a server-rendered version of the route in question, plus some JavaScript that 'hydrates' the page and initialises a client-side router. From that point forward, navigating to other pages is handled entirely on the client for a fast, app-like feel. (Sapper will preload and cache the code for these subsequent pages, so that navigation is instantaneous.)

Server routes are modules written in .js files, that export functions corresponding to HTTP methods. Each function receives Express request and response objects as arguments, plus a next function. This is useful for creating a JSON API, for example.

There are three simple rules for naming the files that define your routes:

  • A file called src/routes/about.svelte corresponds to the /about route. A file called src/routes/blog/[slug].svelte corresponds to the /blog/:slug route, in which case params.slug is available to the route
  • The file src/routes/index.svelte (or src/routes/index.js) corresponds to the root of your app. src/routes/about/index.svelte is treated the same as src/routes/about.svelte.
  • Files and directories with a leading underscore do not create routes. This allows you to colocate helper modules and components with the routes that depend on them — for example you could have a file called src/routes/_helpers/datetime.js and it would not create a /_helpers/datetime route

static

The static directory contains any static assets that should be available. These are served using sirv.

In your service-worker.js file, you can import these as files from the generated manifest...

import { files } from '@sapper/service-worker';

...so that you can cache them (though you can choose not to, for example if you don't want to cache very large files).