Syntax highlight element
👓 Syntax Highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlight API
**syntax highlight element** is a 👓 Syntax Highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlight API The project is written primarily in JavaScript, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2025. Key topics include: custom-elements, javascript, syntax-highlight, syntax-highlighting, web-components.
<syntax-highlight> element
Syntax Highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlight API.
The code is highlighted without having to wrap a bunch of <span> elements around each token, thanks to Prism's tokenizer and the CSS Custom Highlight API.
Examples
For examples checkout the CodePen <syntax-highlight> collection.
Install
Install via npm
shellnpm install syntax-highlight-element
Usage
JavaScript
Import as ES module
jsimport 'syntax-highlight-element';
Or via CDN
html<script type="module" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/syntax-highlight-element@1/+esm"></script>
HTML
html<syntax-highlight language="js"> // ... </syntax-highlight>
CSS
Make sure to load a theme e.g. syntax-highlight-element/themes/prettylights.css.
Or via CDN
html<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/syntax-highlight-element@1/dist/themes/prettylights.min.css">
Currently there are only limited themes available/converted. You can always create your own theme. Contributions are also very welcome.
Attributes
languageThe code language. The default isplaintext. Default suported languageshtml|css|js.content-selectorA CSS selector to specify the content element. The default is the element itself.
Configuration
js/** * @typedef Config * @type {object} * @property {string[]} languages - List of languages to support for syntax highlighting. * @property {string[]} tokenTypes - Token types used during lexing/parsing. * @property {{[key: string]: string[]}} languageTokens - Mapping of language names to their specific tokenization rules. * @property {function} setup - Runs before the custom element gets defined in the registry. * @property {function} tokenize - Tokenize text based on the specified language grammar */ window.she = window.she || {}; /** @type {Config} */ window.she.config = { languages: ['markup', 'css', 'javascript'], // Default tokenTypes: [], languageTokens: {}, setup: async () => {}, tokenize: (text, language) => [], };
Full list of all languages supported by the prism tokenizer.
Browser Support
<picture> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" srcset="https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features/assets/img/baseline-newly-word-dark.svg"> <img src="https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features/assets/img/baseline-newly-word.svg" width="224" height="63" alt="Baseline newly availability wordmark"> </picture>Credits
- Bramus Van Damme and his blog post where I first read about using the CSS Custom Highlight API for syntax highlighting.
- Prism's tokenizer.
License
Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.
Contributors
Showing top 2 contributors by commit count.
