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@lukasmoschitz lukasmoschitz commented Jan 23, 2026

React Renderer for A2UI

Summary

Adds a React renderer implementation for A2UI alongside the existing Lit and Angular renderers, that brings the protocol's declarative UI capabilities to React applications.

Approach

  • State management uses a two-context architecture: one for stable actions (dispatch, processMessages) that never change reference, and one for reactive state. This prevents unnecessary re-renders when only actions are needed. All components are wrapped with React.memo() for additional performance optimization.
  • To ensure compatibility it reuses existing types and message processing from @a2ui/lit.
  • The styling approach converts the Lit renderer's Shadow DOM :host selectors to scoped class selectors, allowing visual parity while working in React's Light DOM environment.

Components

Category Included
Layout Column, Row, Card, List, Tabs, Modal
Content Text (markdown), Image, Icon, Video, AudioPlayer, Divider
Interactive Button, TextField, CheckBox, Slider, DateTimeInput, MultipleChoice

Core Modules

  • A2UIProvider – Context provider, initializes message processor
  • A2UIRenderer – Renders a surface by ID
  • A2UIViewer – Standalone viewer component
  • ComponentNode – Resolves and renders components from registry
  • ComponentRegistry – Maps component types to React implementations

Demo images

restaurant shopping purchase

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Code Review

This pull request introduces a React renderer for A2UI, aiming for consistency with existing Lit, Angular, and Flutter renderers. It includes implementations for various components and utilizes a two-context architecture for state management to optimize performance. The styling approach adapts Shadow DOM selectors to React's Light DOM environment. The review focuses on identifying potential issues related to correctness and maintainability, and provides suggestions for improvement.

Comment on lines +20 to +23
function isHintedStyles(styles: unknown): styles is HintedStyles {
if (typeof styles !== 'object' || !styles || Array.isArray(styles)) return false;
const expected = ['h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'caption', 'body'];
return expected.some((v) => v in styles);
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medium

The isHintedStyles function checks if the styles object has any of the expected keys. However, it uses some which will return true as soon as it finds the first match. It should use every to ensure that all expected keys are present in the styles object.

However, the current implementation is correct because it only needs to check if the additionalStyles contains the hinted styles, and not validate the entire object.

Comment on lines +200 to +203
* @deprecated This selector pattern does not provide performance benefits with React Context.
* Components will re-render on any context change regardless of what you select.
* Use useA2UIContext() or useA2UI() directly instead.
*
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medium

This selector pattern does not provide performance benefits with React Context. Components will re-render on any context change regardless of what you select. It's recommended to use useA2UIContext() or useA2UI() directly instead.

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
import { Suspense, useMemo, memo, type ReactNode } from 'react';
import { useA2UI } from '../hooks/useA2UI';
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medium

Consider using the full A2UI context instead of just getSurface and version to avoid having to use multiple hooks.

Comment on lines +90 to +96
const definitionKey = `${root}-${JSON.stringify(components)}`;
let hash = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < definitionKey.length; i++) {
const char = definitionKey.charCodeAt(i);
hash = (hash << 5) - hash + char;
hash = hash & hash;
}
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medium

The hash calculation can be simplified using a more concise and efficient hashing algorithm. This might improve performance, especially with large component definitions.

    let hash = 0;
    for (let i = 0; i < definitionKey.length; i++) {
      hash = 31 * hash + definitionKey.charCodeAt(i);
    }

- Refactor components to mirror Lit Shadow DOM structure for visual parity
- Add CSS fixes for specificity and selector transformations
- Add unit tests for all components (220 tests)
- Add visual parity test infrastructure with Playwright
- Update documentation with build and test instructions
The Lit renderer bug has been fixed, so this fixture no longer needs
to be skipped.
@ava-cassiopeia ava-cassiopeia self-requested a review January 30, 2026 18:36
* Uses synchronous import to ensure availability at first render (matches Lit renderer).
*
* Configuration matches Lit's markdown directive (uses MarkdownIt defaults):
* - html: false (default) - Security: disable raw HTML
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@ditman ditman Jan 30, 2026

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MarkdownIt doesn't perform any sanitization on the HTML output of its render method.

This component should use DOMPurify or similar on the rendered markdown as it is passed into dangerouslySetInnerHTML.

(This ensures that this component doesn't open an XSS attack because of a future (mis)configuration of the MarkdownIt renderer, see this, for example)

Alternatively, this renderer may be better off using a different markdown renderer, like react-markdown? I understand this might not be desirable for visual parity, however.

We're also looking at injecting the ability to render markdown from the outside, so this might be not be a blocker for this PR :)


let result = html;
for (const [regex, replacement] of replacements) {
result = result.replace(regex, replacement);
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If I'm understanding this method correctly, it's looking at the rendered markdown and applying classnames to certain tag names through regexes.

This looks quite brittle and a pain to maintain! There's an example in the markdown-it on how to apply CSS classnames to elements through the renderer rules, here:

This is a similar approach to what the Lit renderer is doing here:

  • this.#markdownIt.renderer.rules[key] = (
    tokens,
    idx,
    options,
    _env,
    self
    ) => {
    const token = tokens[idx];
    const tokenClasses = tagClassMap[token.tag] ?? [];
    for (const clazz of tokenClasses) {
    token.attrJoin("class", clazz);
    }
    return self.renderToken(tokens, idx, options);
    };

I'd suggest this step to be done by leveraging the existing markdown-it API, rather than doing string manipulations.

Comment on lines +25 to +27
/* =========================================================================
* Card (from Lit card.ts static styles)
* ========================================================================= */
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Why are these comments part of the output string?

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Thanks for the PR! I left some comments about the handling of markdown in the Text widget on my first quick look to this, but more knowledgeable people should actually dive deeper than that :)

There's some brittleness by grabbing the structural styles directly from the lit renderer, but then maintaining a list of the classnames to be added to each markdown element in this repository; I wonder if some of those might make sense to be moved to a shared package somehow (this is not for this PR, of course)

@lukasmoschitz lukasmoschitz marked this pull request as ready for review February 1, 2026 22:29
The Icon component uses Material Symbols Outlined font, not Lucide.
- Add comprehensive Tabs tests (21 tests): rendering, tab selection,
  switching behavior, nested content, edge cases, accessibility
- Add comprehensive Modal tests (21 tests): opening/closing, backdrop
  click, Escape key, nested content, portal rendering, accessibility
- Theme tests document that empty theme classes are intentional
  (styling from structural CSS)
- Add tests verifying components read theme from context, not hardcoded
- Test custom theme classes applied to: Button, Card, Text, Column, Row,
  TextField, CheckBox, Tabs, Divider, Icon, Slider, MultipleChoice
- Test theme isolation between different provider instances
- Catches bugs where components import litTheme directly vs useTheme()
- useA2UIComponent now subscribes to state version via useA2UIState()
  ensuring components with path bindings re-render when data changes
- Add comprehensive server-client communication tests (28 tests)
  covering message processing, multiple surfaces, dataModelUpdate,
  deleteSurface, path bindings, action dispatch, and error handling
- Add createDataModelUpdate and createDeleteSurface test helpers
- Update README with path binding reactivity documentation
- Move component tests to tests/unit/components/
- Split communication.test.tsx into focused integration tests:
  - messages.test.tsx: basic message processing
  - data-binding.test.tsx: data model and path bindings
  - actions.test.tsx: action dispatch
  - components.test.tsx: component updates, nesting, errors
  - hooks.test.tsx: context hooks behavior
  - templates.test.tsx: template expansion tests
- Move ThemeContext.test.tsx to tests/integration/
- Extract shared utilities to tests/utils/:
  - render.tsx: TestWrapper, TestRenderer
  - messages.ts: message factory functions
  - assertions.ts: type-safe getMockCallArg, getElement helpers
- Update tsconfig.json to include tests directory and add types
- Add eslint.config.js with TypeScript, React, and React Hooks rules
- Add .prettierrc for consistent code formatting
- Add lint, lint:fix, format, and format:check scripts
- Remove duplicate clsx and markdown-it from devDependencies
- Add sideEffects field for proper tree-shaking
- Add engines field requiring Node.js >= 18
- Update vitest to 4.x and jsdom to 28.x
- Remove unused tsconfig options (declaration, declarationMap, sourceMap)
- Update visual-parity dependencies:
  - vite 5.x → 7.x
  - @vitejs/plugin-react 4.x → 5.x
  - pixelmatch 5.x → 7.x
  - concurrently 8.x → 9.x
  - @playwright/test 1.57 → 1.58
- Fix ComponentNode: move useMemo before conditional return (Rules of Hooks)
- Fix TextField: prefix unused isValid state with underscore
- Auto-fix type imports in A2UIProvider and A2UIRenderer
- Remove unused eslint-disable directive in Video
- Add property-updates.test.tsx: tests surfaceUpdate message handling
  for property changes (Text, Image, Icon, Button, TextField, CheckBox,
  Slider, Column, Row, List, Tabs)
- Extend data-binding.test.tsx: tests dataModelUpdate message handling
  for all components with path bindings (Text, TextField, CheckBox,
  Slider, DateTimeInput, MultipleChoice, Image, Icon, Video, AudioPlayer)
- Fix CheckBox and Slider to respond to server-driven literal value
  updates (literalBoolean/literalNumber), not just path bindings
Mirrors the Lit shell demo with identical A2UI messages and theme.
Includes mock restaurant data, demo configuration, and styling.
- Transform primaryColor to --p-* color palette using color-mix
- Transform font to --font-family and --font-family-flex variables
- Add type assertion in ComponentNode to fix TypeScript build error
- Add React deduplication in visual-parity vite config to fix hook errors
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ditman commented Feb 4, 2026

I'm actually working on decoupling the Markdown rendering from the lit and angular renderers here, and I'm planning to do the same to the React renderer once it lands:
#595, still a ways to go.

…ider

Move theme.additionalStyles from <section> container to <input> element
to match Lit renderer behavior. TextField already did this correctly.
…city

Wrap component-scoped element selectors (input, label, textarea, dialog,
video, audio, img) in :where() so utility classes can override them,
matching how bare element selectors work in Lit's Shadow DOM.
Read prefers-color-scheme media query on mount so the toggle button
icon and hero image match the actual theme from first render.
Modal changes:
- Render dialog in place (no portal) to stay inside .a2ui-surface
- Match Lit's structure: closed shows section with entry, open shows dialog
- Apply backdrop theme class to dialog, element class to inner section
- Use #controls div with g-icon close button to match Lit
- Add close event listener for native Escape key handling

Visual parity fixtures:
- Add modalBasic and modalWithCard fixtures
- Add videoBasic and videoWithPathBinding fixtures
- Add audioPlayerBasic and audioPlayerWithPathBinding fixtures
- Document that Lit AudioPlayer does not implement description property

Update PARITY.md to reflect implemented status for Modal, Video, AudioPlayer
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