What happens to your web development process when you can focus on designing views and stop thinking about how to stitch them together?

Trimmings is a zero-configuration Javascript library that adds a layer of smooth and fast in-page interaction to your web pages. All you have to do is add some hints to the HTML you already have.

This project follows in the footsteps of libraries like Turbolinks and Stimulus. It believes that the best place for your business and rendering logic is on the server, that you should send your users HTML, and that Javascript is best suited for progressively-enhanced DOM manipulation. Trimmings is a set of patterns that allow you to add DOM manipulation to your app by adding data-trimmings-* attributes to your interactive elements. Less Javascript in your project means less risk.

Once you’ve built your website and it’s serving HTML that’s presented the way you like it, you can start adding Trimmings hints that will enhance the way your interactions behave.

Perhaps you have a link to a detail page that you’d like to open in a modal. The standalone page probably has a header and footer that you wouldn’t want to render in your modal. That’s no problem. Just add an inline hint to your link:

<a data-trimmings-inline="from: .detail-container, to: .modal-container" href="/photos/2">
  View as a modal
</a>

If your visitor clicks that link, the page will be fetched in the background, the element with the detail-container class will be extracted from the result, and it will be inserted in an element with the modal-container class that’s already on the page. You can write CSS that will make this show up however you like. Now you have a modal! That’s all there is to it!

Benefits

Increased stability. An HTML-powered product means your inputs and outputs are much easier to predict, which means your app is much easier to test. Progressively enhance your UX with stable code that you don’t need to worry about.
App-like responsiveness. Define subtle interactions with markup instead of code. Pair Trimmings with Turbolinks for an even more seamless experience!
Natural fallbacks. If something goes wrong—Javascript is disabled, assets fail to load, a third-party tracker raises an exception—your modals and inline embeds will still work, because they’re just links to other pages.
Easier caching. Keep your pages small and focused and use Trimmings’s powerful inline-embed features to compose them into complex views. Now you don’t need to think about fragment caching—it’s all just pages!
Eject as necessary. Trimmings’s API was inspired by Stimulus and the two libraries work happily together. Trimmings is designed to never allow extension with client-side code, but if you ever need to add your own logic, you can drop in Stimulus controllers without disrupting your workflow or your existing Trimmings hints.

Installation

Just include trimmings.js in your <head>. That’s it. Trimmings will automatically activate when your page loads—no need to think about lifecycles.

<script src="/trimmings.js"></script>

Usage

Trimmings features are enabled on specific elements by adding data-trimmings-* attributes. Refer to Features for more details on how each feature works.