SnapDOM v3.4.0 is out: meet snapdom.stream 🎥

[tinchox5]

Hi everyone 👋

v3.4.0 just shipped, and it's one of the biggest releases we've had in a while. Here are the highlights.

The headline: snapdom.stream

Until now SnapDOM took snapshots: you capture a node and get one image. Stream turns that into a live canvas. It follows a DOM element and repaints only what changed, so you get a moving picture of your HTML instead of a single frame.

What that opens up:

• Broadcast overlays. Build lower thirds, scoreboards and tickers in plain HTML/CSS and pipe them into video. The release ships ready-made overlay templates (with shader looks) and a playground to try them.
• HTML inside a WebRTC video track. You can send a live HTML overlay as part of a video stream.
• WebGL and video. Use live DOM as a texture, put two live elements in a 3D virtual set, or bend live video through liquid-glass overlay boxes. There are demos for all of these.
• It patches out-of-flow boxes that move or resize, and full frames no longer freeze the page.

Stream lives in @zumer/snapdom-plugins/stream. Please play with the demos and tell me what you build. This is the part I most want feedback on.

Also new

• JPEG export beyond the canvas size limit. Very large captures now work.
• A quiet console unless you set debug: true.
• Subpixel offset layout for capture roots, available on request.

Fidelity fixes

A long list. The main ones:

• Right-to-left layouts, found by the new RTL demos
• Font families whose names contain __ (Fonts with "__" in the family name are never embedded #542)
• Gradient text using oklch, lab and color()
• Emoji and late nested images in Safari exports
• 1px borders in downscaled Firefox exports
• Opaque WebGL canvases that clear every frame
• MathML tokens, icon fonts, and live-page mounts under a strict style-src CSP

The test suite grew a lot too. There's now a live parity check that compares every demo against the real page across engines.

A huge thank you to Syntax.fm ❤️

I want to give a very special thanks to Syntax.fm for sponsoring SnapDOM. Their financial support makes a real difference for a project maintained in spare hours. It's the reason a release this big, with this much testing behind it, was possible. Wes, Scott and the whole team: thank you for backing open source, and for backing this project in particular.

If SnapDOM helps you at work, please consider sponsoring too. Every bit helps keep it moving.

📦 Full changelog: v3.3.7...v3.4.0

Thanks for using SnapDOM, and keep the issues and ideas coming!

— Martín