Dash HTML Components

Dash is a web app framework that provides pure Python abstraction around HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Instead of writing HTML or using an HTML templating engine, you compose your layout using Python with the Dash HTML Components module (dash.html).

Import dash.html with:

from dash import html

The Dash HTML Components module is part of Dash and you’ll find the source for it in the Dash GitHub repo.

Tip: In production Dash apps, we recommend using Dash Enterprise Design Kit to style Dash HTML Components.

Here is an example of a simple HTML structure:

from dash import html

html.Div([
    html.H1('Hello Dash'),
    html.Div([
        html.P('Dash converts Python classes into HTML'),
        html.P("This conversion happens behind the scenes by Dash's JavaScript front-end")
    ])
])

which gets converted (behind the scenes) into the following HTML in your web app:

<div>
    <h1>Hello Dash<h1>
    <div>
        <p>Dash converts Python classes into HTML<p>
        <p>This conversion happens behind the scenes by Dash's JavaScript front-end<p>
    <div>
<div>

If you’re not comfortable with HTML, don’t worry!
You can get 95% of the way there with just a few elements
and attributes.

If you want to use Markdown in your app, you can use the Dash Core Components Markdown component:

HTML Component Properties

If you’re using HTML components, then you also have access to
properties like style, class, and id.
All of these attributes are available in the Python classes.

The HTML elements and Dash classes are mostly the same but there are
a few key differences:
- The style property is a dictionary
- Properties in the style dictionary are camelCased
- The class key is renamed as className
- Style properties in pixel units can be supplied as just numbers without the px unit

Let’s take a look at an example.

from dash import html

html.Div([
    html.Div('Example Div', style={'color': 'blue', 'fontSize': 14}),
    html.P('Example P', className='my-class', id='my-p-element')
], style={'marginBottom': 50, 'marginTop': 25})

That Dash code will render this HTML markup:

<div>

    <div>
        Example Div
    <div>

    <p>
        Example P
    <p>

<div>

If you need to directly render a string of raw, unescaped HTML, you can use the DangerouslySetInnerHTML component which is provided by the dash-dangerously-set-inner-html library.

n_clicks and disable_n_clicks

All Dash HTML components have an n_clicks property, which is an integer that represents the number of times the element has been clicked. You can use n_clicks to trigger a callback and use the value of n_clicks in your callback logic.

In this example, we capture the n_clicks value from the html.Div with ID click-div and output it to the html.P with ID click-output. n_clicks uses an event listener to capture user click events on the element and increment the n_clicks value.

Many Dash HTML components are rarely intended to be clicked (in the example above, it’s unusual that the html.Div is clickable—a better design choice would be to use a button). Even when you use elements like html.Div that you don’t intend for the user to click, the n_clicks event listener causes screen-reading software to interpret the elements as clickable, which can be confusing.

In Dash 2.8 and later, Dash HTML components are improved for better control over the n_clicks event listener:
- If you don’t give your HTML component an ID, the n_clicks event listener is not added.
- If your HTML component does have an ID but you don’t need to capture clicks, you can disable the n_clicks event listener by setting disable_n_clicks=True.

Here is the same example as above, but we’ve decided that we don’t need to capture clicks, so we’ve disabled n_clicks on the html.Div (the callback is for illustrative purposes):

With disable_n_clicks=True, we convey to screen reader assisted users that the html.Div is not clickable.

Full Elements Reference