Alpine.js VS PostCSS

Alpine.js for reactive frontend

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

> But honestly, torn towards htmx but undecided.

We are in the middle of migrating from our monster react application into server rendered pages (with jinja2). The velocity at which we are able to ship and the reduction of complexity has been great so far.

Managing client side state for simple things like (is the dropdown open/closed), listening to keyboard events and such can be done with something like alpine-js [1] without all the baggage that something like react brings.

It appears this is already the trend with JS frameworks too - with server side rendering being the new norm.

[1] https://alpinejs.dev/

Sure, you can use any number of JS-avoidance libraries. I'm a fan of Turbo, and there's also htmx, Unpoly, Alpine, hyperscript, swup, barba.js, and probably others.

Direct DOM, but with a library. Specifically AlpineJS since it follows Vue closely in design practices allowing me to scale into a full web application if necessary (basically swapping to Vue takes minimal work). The Morph plugin is specifically what I like using.

If you want more details on the initial setup I encourage you to take a look at the Part I that covers more of the initial implementation. For this portion, I added Prisma as an ORM, a frontend style library called Tachyons, and AlpineJS to handle any client-side interactions. I did this to avoid needing to add a client-side bundler to the build and instead just rely on plain old module imports to compose the frontend. This is now the default for Rails and it is quite nice to not need any additional build tools for the client.

- [swallow-pywebview](https://github.com/rangwea/swallow-pywebview)： Base on [pywebview](https://pywebview.flowrl.com/) using Python，the frontend base on [alpinejs](https://alpinejs.dev/) and [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/)。

If you’ve followed our other tutorials, you might be familiar with Alpine.js. It’s a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to add interactivity to your site without writing a single line of JavaScript. It’s incredibly easy to use, and we’ll show you how to make the animation trigger when the user scrolls to it.

The approach is not new, essentially a variation of Knockout, Alpine, and similar "JS-in-HTML" approaches.

the plugins in the official PostCSS website were old like IE6 or the marquee tag, and

Hello internet. I just published a new blog post on how to implement dark mode with SvelteKit, optionally with PostCSS and TailwindCSS:

There are many frontend tools available for this purpose. For example, PostCSS is a popular CSS processor that can combine and minimize your code. With the right plugin, it can even fix your code for compatibility issues, making sure your CSS styles work for all browsers.

I use PostCSS to extend CSS’s features and to add a few things that make writing styles a little more convenient, but it could easily be swapped for another preprocessor like Sass or vanilla CSS. It’s up to you. You can view my PostCSS config here.

Code transpilation isn't specific to JavaScript, You can also add a level of transformation to your CSS source using tools like post-css. Most languages with a fairly mature ecosystem will probably have some tools to help with code transformation.

In large projects, it is still a good idea to use PostCSS, which will translate new CSS features to something that browsers understand today.

LiveCodes provides many of the commonly used developer tools. These include Monaco editor (that powers VS Code), Prettier, Emmet, Vim/Emacs modes, Babel, TypeScript, SCSS, Less, PostCSS, Jest and Testing Library, among others. All these tools run seamlessly in the browser without any installations or configurations. It feels like a very light-weight version of your own local development environment including the keyboard shortcuts, IntelliSense and code navigation features.

Usually, one of the first things I do on creating a new web app is to throw a UI library in to help style components. There are several UI libraries that can be used by Svelte, but in this case I went with daisyUI because it's a fairly popular UI library which includes tailwind. To install daisyUI, you first need to install tailwind. There's a few different ways to do this (such as this guide), but the easiest way I've found is the following command, which also adds PostCSS and AutoPrefixer:

Vanilla CSS has taken a similar path with ambitious working drafts, better browser support, and PostCSS to fill the gap for user agents lagging behind. So why is Sass/SCSS still so popular? Maybe we go so used to it that we might have forgotten what problems it was meant to solve in the first place.