Discussion: Should we allow a “Node” as content.

[theengineear]

Current

const container = document.createElement('div');
const input = document.createElement('input');
render(container, html`${input}`);
// <div>[object HTMLInputElement]</div>

We could handle Nodes in a special manner where we just bind the live value directly as content. We would also want to consider whether a Node would be allowed as a value of an array.

Pros

• Just let me do the thing!

Cons

• Added complexity / surface area to maintain.
• Could invite bad practices.
• Typically easy to work around (create a template or use observe).

[theengineear]

💡 — Another option here would be to enable some sort of syntax that could act as a “callback when instantiated”. Either way, this ticket is really about gaining references to nodes to leverage imperative apis. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

const callback = node => {
  node.addEventListener('change', () => console.log('changed!'));
}
html`<input(${callback})>`; // The “callback” method is called when the `input` is created.

[klebba]

Note that if a DOM node binding is reused within a template only the last occurrence will actually be displayed (because copies of the Node will not occur)

Perhaps if we used a DocumentFragment we could detect this case and throw