ed-components

Teach, learn, explore new possibilities in education with these web components.

• Easy to write with a Lightweight markup language based on Markdown.
• Easy to use, it can be used without any server with a simple Web browser.
• Easy to share, save and reuse with a file based approach, no database required.

White book

ed-components are implemented as web-components and can be used in the client-side without any server.

ed-components could be integrated in any LMS or CMS with server-side hydration and server-side grading thanks to DOM Events.

A playground is provided for teachers that do not want to install anything. Fill a form and submit it to get a shareable url with the form data encoded in the url.

ed-components emit events in order to be used in server apps.

ed-components can be exported to various formats using pandoc.

An open-source library of contents is published as a git repo.

Syntax

Problems are easy to write thanks to a markdown like syntax which will turn your text into the interactive html ed-components.

For example using the <ed-choice> let you easily write choices questions like this.

<ed-choice>
# Einstein formula

We remind you that $$E=m c^2$$

What means $E$ in this formula?

   - [ ] empty
   - [x] energy
   - [ ] entropy
</ed-choice>

See ed-choice for more information.

Internationalization

The interface of the components (buttons, messages, accessible labels) is in English or French. Its language is the ui-lang attribute of the component or of an ancestor, else the page language (<html lang="fr">), else English. The lang attribute of a component is the language of the exercise, not of the interface: a Spanish <ed-speech lang="es"> in a French page talks French.

<html lang="fr">
  ...
  <ed-pb ui-lang="en">…</ed-pb>
</html>

Messages can be changed, or another language added, with registerMessages (missing messages fall back to English):

import { registerMessages } from "@ed-components/ed-components/i18n";

registerMessages("fr", { submit: "Valider" });
registerMessages("de", { submit: "Prüfen", progress: "Fortschritt" });

The message keys are listed in components/common/src/i18n.ts, and typed by Messages. @ed-components/ed-components/i18n loads no element, unlike the main entry point from a CDN.

events

Use https://www.xapijs.dev/ verbs, see https://doc.xapi.fr/profiles/xapi/taxonomy/verbs

Each component emits Custom EdEvents that can be accessed in the details attribute.

{
  "date": "2023-08-17T13:58:11.038Z",
  "url": "http://localhost:8080/components/ed-quiz/",
  "edc": "_EdQuiz",
  "title": "Quiz",
  "verb": "RESPONDED",
  "question": 2,
  "answer": 2
}

Documentation

The website is build using eleventy. Each README.md file is turned into a html page.

Each html source code starting with <ed- is turned into an interactive demo.

Run pnpm start to work on the site at http://localhost:8080: it rebuilds the components, styles and pages on each change.

Formatting

JavaScript and TypeScript are formatted, with sorted imports, by Biome, configured in biome.json:

• pnpm format formats the files and sorts their imports;
• pnpm format:check only checks them.

Git hooks

The hooks of .pre-commit-config.yaml run on each commit. They work with prek or pre-commit, which read the same configuration (commands below with prek, the same with pre-commit).

Install them once after cloning:

prek install

On each commit, the biome hook formats the staged JavaScript and TypeScript files with the Biome of the project (as pnpm format). When it changes a file, the commit fails: review the changes, stage them and commit again.

git commit -m "My change"   # fails: "files were modified by this hook"
git add -p                  # review and stage the formatting changes
git commit -m "My change"   # passes

Other commands:

• prek run checks the staged files without committing;
• prek run --all-files checks the whole repository, e.g. after changing biome.json;
• prek list lists the hooks;
• SKIP=biome git commit … skips the hook for one commit, git commit --no-verify skips all hooks;
• prek uninstall removes the hooks.

Testing on a phone

Browsers only give access to the microphone (ed-speech) on secure pages: https, or localhost. Opening the dev server with the computer's IP address (http://192.168.x.x:8080) does not work, so the site is exposed through an https tunnel with localtunnel:

1. Run pnpm start:mobile, which runs pnpm start and the tunnel together (or pnpm tunnel when pnpm start is already running).
2. Open the https://….loca.lt URL printed in the terminal on the phone.
3. On the first visit, the tunnel page asks for a password: the public IP of the computer, shown by https://loca.lt/mytunnelpassword opened on the computer.

While the tunnel is open, anyone with its URL can reach the dev server: stop it after testing.

Syntax overview

Ed components are sort of cousin of Open Edx Problems.

Open edx use olx an xml format to describe problems. As much as possible ed-components follows the vocabulary used in olx, enabling an easy conversion of ed-components content to olx to be used in edx platforms.

However, ed-components goal is simplicity, so information is embedded in a Lightweight markup language based on Markdown.

Also, as ed-components can be used in the client-side, script programmatic graders should use javascript instead of python.

Release

The changelog and versions are managed with Changesets:

1. With each user facing change, run pnpm changeset: pick the bump type (patch, minor, major) and describe the change for the package users. This adds a file in .changeset/ to commit with the change.
2. To release, run pnpm release:version: it bumps the version of components/package.json and writes components/CHANGELOG.md from the pending changesets. Review them and commit (vX.Y.Z).
3. Run pnpm release:tag then pnpm release:push. It pushes main with the vX.Y.Z tag, which triggers the GitHub workflow that publishes the package to npm, and moves the release branch to the tagged commit.

The documentation site is deployed by Netlify from the release branch, so it always matches the version published on npm (main may contain unreleased changes).

The workflow publishes with npm trusted publishing (no npm token): the package settings on npmjs.com must trust the GitHub repository ed-components/ed-components and the workflow npm-publish.yml.

References

• Web components Guide
• Open UI for presentational content.
• zoo-web-components bundle vanilla web-components with shared part.

Roadmap

1. Enable blank lines in ed components children of ed-quiz.
2. Docs: implement search with Pagefind
3. DEV: Try bun instead of pnpm.