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List.js

listjs.com

441 pointsbloodberet83 comments

6.899kb cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable

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One note--and this applies to every Javascript plugin or library:

Your examples need to be online. Without exception.

As soon as I have to download and run local examples, honestly I just completely lose interest. That may seem impatient, a snap judgment, arbitrary and irrational. It is in fact all of these but it doesn't matter.

There's no reason you can't have your demos online. It makes it super easy for anyone to check out.

I totally agree with examples being online but they have an example page listed at the top http://listjs.com/examples.html

The problem is that the focus is on the Download and social sharing buttons. I would just remove all that completely.

Agreed, I removed all of it!

I would say that a working example on the home page should be required.

There is an example on the home page.

So, one thing I don't quite understand: If I have jQuery on my page (which I imagine now at least 50% of websites do, though that's just a guess) why would I want to add another script that redefines a bunch of jQuery functions? If you had a jQuery compliant version, wouldn't it be smaller, faster, better?

I'm sure you would, but not everybody is using or likes jQuery. A standalone script such as this one is far more valuable.

Not everyone does, but it is used by over 49% of the 10,000 most visited websites making it the most popular JavaScript library in use today.

I'm not saying a standalone is invaluable, but if you're bragging about how it's only 7k, shouldn't there also be a 5k version for people already using the most popular JavaScript library in use today?

http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library/...

I might be wrong but I believe some parts of the JS community resent jQuery's ubiquity (which has arguably reached the point where people think jQuery is javascript).

That people are now taking the time to create pure JS solutions is nothing but a good thing, and there's certainly no reason why people should have to depend on a third party library if they don't want to.

Finally, your latter point about filesize is a false economy, because a 5k version still requires a 30kb DOM abstraction as a dependency. And since the thing has no external dependencies, why on earth would you want to hobble it with one it doesn't even need?

All these pure JS scripts and utilities get a nice new home in my bookmarks bar, because they're a lot more valuable to me than a shoddy jQuery plugin.

If you use 1 JS script on your site, i'll agree. What happens when you include 3 of these though? 10? 15? Suddenly you have tons of duplicate code, trying to implement getAttribute across browsers...wouldn't it be better if they all used the same DOM abstraction library...if only something like that existed...

Or maybe I use a different library? Maybe jQuery is not to my liking at all? The convention of writing libraries as jQuery-specific is a cancer in the community right now. Making a library specific to a particular utility should be a secondary project goal.

Helping jQuery monopolise the JS space even further doesn't strike me as a good idea or beneficial to the community at large.

The main drawback is that it doesn't help people learn Javascript at all. And then it's hard to get information and help with JS because practically every result returns a jQuery plugin or something that uses jQuery. And as a result of that people think, "oh, I need jQuery installed to do some javascript on my site." And then other people complain, "this script isn't jQuery I can't-" ... oh.

Wouldn't it actually be better if JS implementations were actually standardised so its behaviour across browsers was totally predictable and reliable?

> redefines a bunch of jQuery functions

Just clocked this. jQuery redefines more than just a bunch of javascript functions as well as then redefining its own. It's a bit of a mess.

I totally agree. It would be way better if JavaScript implementations were standardized.

It would also be way better for developers if all computers had infinite memory.

It's just not in the cards though.

jQuery standardizes the mess that is JavaScript implementations so that developers can worry about their application instead of the browser. I don't think you should lament jQuery for being so popular, you should lament browser manufacturers (ahem, Microsoft) and the W3C for not creating and following good JavaScript specifications.

That's like blaming Dennis Ritchie for killing the Assembly community.

Why do so many JS mini-libraries expect an ID or a CSS selector? Why not accept an element too, which lets you augment anything? Seriously, you're just crippling your library, and adding complexity by not accepting elements.

Good idea! The id-parameter could absolutely be a element instead, will add that to next release.

But one point with only allowing id i.e is consistency.

I'd like to see something like this for Backbone collections, e.g. it would take a query on model attributes and generate a subset of the original collection. Then any views (not just lists) tied to this subset would update automatically.

In fact I think with _.fiter() you could probably do this in a few lines.

I've tweaked the proposal at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6865174/backbone-js-corre... to do just what you describe.

don't want to hijack the thread, but perhaps something like this http://rudasn.github.com/meelo-store ?

Voila.

    collection.each(function(model) { 
      model.set({visible: matchesSearch(model)});
    });

And then, in your view:

    model.bind("change:visible", function() {
      $(this.el).toggle(model.get("visible"));
    });

... assuming that you have a "matchesSearch" function that can tell you if a given model matches the current search term.

kinda neat...but...you need to read: http://contrastrebellion.com/

and redesign your site...easily the biggest violation of my eyes ever.

lol.. hn is on the list.

The screenshot is of an older version of HN. pg, Did the change occur as a result of showing up on Contrast Rebellion?

There's a fair amount of merit to downvoted comments having their contrast lowered.

I hate that, personally. I don't always have to agree with whoever downvoted, or sometimes I'm just curious about what it said.

Especially the lowest contrast, after several downvotes, that's just stupid, because it's pretty much unreadable unless you select the text. So you know there's text, but you can't really read it, then why show it at all?

I'd say is so you can quickly highlight it to read it.

Except that's not a downvoted comment or an old version as far as I can tell; it's the text of a Ask HN/Show HN thing. I never really understood why those are colored gray, either.

Edit: Ok, apparently it's supposed to discourage using HN as a blog (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807183). I still think it's odd.

That's an awful website too. White text on dark background is a complete readability failure, no matter how much contrast it provides.

In some agreement... According to an article on "color for developers" that was posted at some point on HN, one gets a better "pop" contrast if there is a smidgeon of color. As I read it, using white or black, regardless of the other color involved in the combo, is less effective. One should strive instead to add at least a little bit of color and contrast that color with the other. For example, if you toss a tiny bit of blue into your black, then you should toss a tiny bit of yellow/orange into your white. The contrast is not in symmetric values either; R, G, and B have different contributions to the brightness.

If I have the time to dig up the article I am thinking about, I will add it to this post.

(Here is the HN thread on the contrastrebellion site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047)

Twaddle! I find dark text on a white background unbearable. I'm much happier with off white on a dark background.

Anyway - each to their own. It looked okay to me, apart from some tiny script in places. (Safari, OSX 10.4, 1280x854)

> White text on dark background is a complete readability failure, no matter how much contrast it provides.

I prefer white-on-black. To me, reading black-on-white feels somewhat akin to staring into a projector.

For many people, high intensity/high contrast also causes eyestrain. There's nothing wrong or unreadable about medium contrast text, despite what the somewhat triumphalist contrastrebellion would have you believe.

The list.js is completely and easily readable.

I didn't have any problem reading the site - perhaps it's your eyes?

In fact, I'd say the Contrast Rebellion logo is the biggest violation of my eyes. Scrolling up and down doesn't seem right...

I spent a good 30 seconds doing that and giggling.

My favorite part about the Contrast Rebellion is that Media Temple is listed as one of the bad examples... and then at the bottom:

hosted by (mt) Media Temple

What search algorithm are you using for the list searching?

I tried [monkey game] and would have expected Monkey Island to show up.

Also, clicking 'edit' I would expect the table row being edited to be edited inline (it's confusing that the focus jumps down to the input boxes)

Potentially really useful but needs a bit of polishing I think - great work though.

It's using a really simple algorithm, but I will definitely update it in later releases!

I may update the examples but, I want to keep them as simple as possible, just enough to show some of the possibilities with List.js

Thanks, but you really need to change that to 7 KB. I thought to myself "7 MB? What a weird JS library" and was about to close the page.

I really changed it ;)

Good complement to Chosen, which gives you improved <select> elements. http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/

Maybe it's just me, but it took me a second to figure out what I was looking at. "HTML Lists" didn't pop out at me right away as specifically meaning <ul> and <ol> for some reason. You should put the source code by your examples so people see what little they put in for the output they see, and it'll clarify (at least to someone like me) exactly what is going on here.

EDIT: I see now that your front page is an example, with source code. That wasn't obvious to me.

Think I have to put a headline describing the list! Wait 5min :)

Looks a lot like quicksand[1] without any of the fancy effects. Or am I missing something?

[1] http://razorjack.net/quicksand/

It looks like quicksand doesn't have text search, and is also about twice the size (14KB).

The filter by type is actually a text search. But filter by function is always more general and powerful.

...and Quicksand is dependent on jQuery :)

What is the license behind the script ? Apache ? MIT ? Other?

MIT according to the project page on Github. It's a little strange that they didn't include the license in the .js file. I guess they wanted to save a few bytes...

Also... 6.899kb is confusing. In many countries/locales(?) that would mean almost 7MB. Maybe 6.9kb should be used instead, or 6899bytes or something like that.

Or just 7KB

Hehe, its fix'd now. 7 KB!

I only realized there were examples on the front page after visiting HN. They're completely below the fold for me (1440x900).

The examples page had a similar problem. The examples (pretty close to the fold) looked like comments. I went to read the comments, seeing if anyone had suggested live examples be put on the site.

The contact list example won't let me add contacts if I click "edit" on one row, then delete that row. The table also seems to degrade if you remove all elements.

"Documentation" and "Source" link to the same (Github) page. At least link to README.md for the documentation. Why is the "Download" link bold?

The front page has no indication of the name of this library above the fold.

Good point about the fold and the name. I added the name to the menu and maybe I will make the logo smaller.

I also added a note about that the contacts-example could contain bugs. My purpose with the example is the show the possibilities with add(), values() and remove(). There fore I have tried to minimize the amount of code (and there by some functionalities). But I will of course fix real bugs if there are any.

The Documentation-link now leads to the readme!

Thanks for your input!

This looks pretty useful. I'm curious why you used class to store the "category". Wouldn't it be cleaner to store it in"data-category" or just Javascript? Or is that less browser compliant?

Overall a great script though.

The reason is simply that I wanted it to be as simple as possible, but if it seems to be a common request I could add support for data-attributes! (and yes, it "works" in IE, by using getAttribute())

i used to use class names to store data types (category is a perfect example). there's a really great reason to do this: you can style your objects based on that type of data without relying on CSS attribute selectors.

that said, i quickly learned that it's better to use data- attributes and copy them into the class when necessary. otherwise you end up with utilities like getCategoryFromClassName()

We would use such a JS file for large lists.

Is there a performant way to use this kind of JS files without loading the full database table into the frontend? I couldn't find anything in the documentation.

There is: give the list a fixed height and a scrollbar to display more. Load the first two or so pages immediately and render them, then request more right away (or as the user scrolls, if they scroll faster than you can load them). As the user scrolls, remove dom elements that are more than a page above or below the visible area to keep the number of nodes small. Obviously, cache the data (and the removed nodes) so that when the user scrolls back to the same spot you can load them again quickly.

If performance is important and you have a lot of data, this is an enormously tricky thing to get right, and perhaps impossible in a general case.

Note that fast scrolling of lots of data is a little-noticed but extremely optimized operation in the OS X and iPhone UI, and has undoubtedly received multiple man-years of attention.

I have optimized the script so that only 200 items are visible by default (change with options = { maxVisibleItemsCount: int }) this makes it possible to add large amounts (100 000+) items into the list without problems (except for sorting, thats sloooow if you have large amout of items).

But I am working on a solution for auto-loading data from callbacks or showing more items in list on the fly. But the problem is that most solutions are dependent on how the HTML/CSS around the list is implemented, which is something I want to avoid. Im thinking a lot about it, though.

Thank you for licensing this - when I checked earlier, it was "I'll figure it out", but thank you for putting it under an open source license.

Nice stuff!

Very cool script. Any support for permalinks? <plug> If you don't need your list to be on your site, you can always use listly for social lists/polling like this example of startup tools - http://list.ly/list/9E-tools-and-services-for-a-lean-startup </plug>

Regarding the examples: Does anyone have a quick readout whether the "edit" button could cause edit-in-place behavior?

This is more in the aggregate, but what is considered best practice when loading JS scripts in a page in terms of sum-total size?

This script (looks cool, btw) comes in at 7k. It seems very easy to me to add "7k here, another 7k there" and next thing you know your page needs to go on a diet.

Question is: what's the threshold that everyone follows?

I think more important than script bandwidth is # of requests.

As long as you combine your scripts, and use Google's APIs to load the cached version of common libraries like JQuery and JQuery UI. You could easily be using 10 of these libraries and still be wayy ahead of the curve as far as bandwidth is concerned.

An idea for extending this:

-Add pagination. I don't mean dynamic/AJAXed pagination -- The entire list can still be loaded in the background (which would still make the list sorting/filtering possible).

perfect, and just in time. I'll be announcing my own project here on HN in a week or two, and List.js will most certainly be taking a very central role.

So nice work, and thanks.

Sweet! I would love to get some feedback when you tried it out.

Is there a similar library that can be used with tables? I like the function and this looks easy to use but my site uses tables over lists.

The Contact List example is a table

http://listjs.com/examples.html

List.js works on most stuff. Tables, ul, divs, ol, spans, etc.

Example 2 at http://listjs.com/examples.html uses tables e.g

How does it compare to http://tablesorter.com/?

http://www.datatables.net/ is nice.

Here's a demo of a very old version of our list http://quietcode.com/smartlist/ It's also on github but the code is so outdated it's not worth linking to. This demo has 4000 items to show its speed with medium datasets

Everything is created dynamically. The js that creates the demo is

    userList = new QCSmartList({
        dataUrl: 'users.json',
        columns: [
            {field:'email'},
            {field:'surname'},
            {field:'firstname', header:'Name'},
            {field:'points'}
        ],
        containerId: 'user-list',
        name: 'users',
        varName: 'userList'
    });

If anyone's interested I can try and get some updated code/demo up later on today (it's only morning here)

Is there a neat collection of all these javascript libraries out there?

I'm sure there are tons of awesome libraries I don't know about.

http://microjs.com/ has a nice collection of js libs.

Seems this has regex support, but I don't see any mention of it anywhere. Try it out.

Put a working example or at least a screenshot on that first page. I don't have time to download a zip file and blah blah blah to see what you made. Make it easy.

The list above the code is a working example of the code.

The example (and code) are below the fold on a 1440 laptop. I didn't even realize they were there.

That is absolutely the most important thing for a library. First page, right after the name. A functional example of what it does.

That huge logo on the homepage is pointless. Replace it with a nice lickable demo (you can move the logo to the header or something), and the page will be twice as effective.

Just my .02.

Once I got to look at the actual example, it looks good :).

It is a working example on the first page? :)

Fantastic script. Nice work!

Its neat and useful.

Nice work :)

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