compiled VS css-modules

tags inside SFCs are typically injected as native </code> tags during development to support hot updates. <strong>For production they can be extracted and merged into a single CSS file.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>There are also 3rd party CSS libs that do the same thing such as <a href="https://linaria.dev/">linaria</a>, <a href="https://vanilla-extract.style/">vanilla-extract</a>, and <a href="https://compiledcssinjs.com/">compiled CSS</a>. Which can be used in the event you're stuck with something that doesn't have baked in support via SFC formats (looking at you React).</p> <p>These are my preferred ways of handing it.</p> <ol> <li>Tailwind</li> </ol> <p>Option 2 is tailwind, which works backwards.</p> <p>That is, instead of the above with extraction where you write the styles, and the framework or libs extract them and replace them with class names, it's the other way around.</p> <p>You're writing class names first (which are essentially aggregated CSS property-values) which then generate and/or reference styles.</p> <p>It has the advantage of being easy to write (assuming you've got editor LSP, linting, etc), but as you've discovered, it's difficult to read / can get really messy really fast.</p> <p>As far as all the other claims on the Tailwind site, it's all marketing, at least 80% bullshit.</p> </div>

Your choice of CSS lib. Bootstrap can still be a valid choice, tho you may want to check the docs of whatever SSR / SSG framework you end up using as they may have better (or worse support). For example if you wanted to do CSS-in-JS (Next) i'd consider Linaria, vanilla-extract, or compiled.

So to be extremely clear, the issue isn't CSS-in-JS per se, it's just that the author only looked at implementations that don't generate create CSS files. He notably mentioned the (apparent) zero-runtime solutions Vanilla Extract and Linaria, only to skip them and complain that Compiled inserts nodes at runtime.

Compiled

Link: https://compiledcssinjs.com/

Compiled (Compile time CSS-in-JS solution from Atlassian)

Stitches Is near zero runtime and vanilla-extract claims it's zero runtime and typed. There's atlassian compiled as well but I never used it.

Author here, I haven't had time to play around with it, but this library[0] from Atlassian looks like a "best of the both worlds" styling approach: CSS-in-JS authorship without the runtime penalty.

[0] https://compiledcssinjs.com/

One aspect of CSS modules that I truly appreciate is its ability to compress class names into very short hashes. This feature allows me to keep my CSS selectors as long and descriptive as needed, while still compressing them into concise three or four character hashes. It aligns with my rule for CSS: selectors should be written for human readability, but compressed for machine efficiency.

Use methodologies such as BEM, and technologies including CSS modules, CSS-in-JS, and Shadow DOM to isolate the styles of each micro-application and prevent conflicts, thus ensuring reliable encapsulation and modularity.

For many years, Culture Amp took the second option, and distributed shared components without compiled CSS. This meant that every app that consumed shared components needed to include the necessary CSS build tooling – at that time CSS Modules and node-sass – with a compatible version and configuration. This was relatively easy to set up, but over time proved difficult to maintain. When node-sass was deprecated in favour of (the much faster but slightly incompatible) Dart Sass, this demanded a difficult lock-step migration across all those codebases, which we have yet to achieve. And as new applications have switched to Tailwind for their own styles, they've had to continue to maintain those old build tools in parallel for the shared components' styles.

So CSS modules are a form of 3rd-party CSS-in-JS, where what you import are the class names, which are then usually obfuscated etc at compile time, and all the actual style declarations are (usually) compiled into a single css file or tag as part of the bundling process. You can read the og docs on'em here, and you've probably seen'em used in React like:

import styles from "./styles.css";

function Example(){
    return (
        

            Hello
        
    );
}

They predate the ability to import non-js files in vanilla by a good while, and rely on the compile process to translate your .css files into .js files that can be imported using whichever loader you use in your bundler.

Import assertions are a vanilla way to import non-js files by telling the browser how to import them; assert { type: "css" } says to treat the file as CSS and create a CSSStyleSheet, assert { type: "json" } says to treat the file as JSON and create a JSON object - and hopefully assert { type: "html" } will hopefully arrive soon and create a #document-fragment or something similar.

Hope that clears it up!

Extensions of CSS: for example, Sass, Less, Tailwind, CSS Modules, to make stuff look a certain way on your own.

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

NextJS comes with built-in support for CSS Modules which allows you to scope your styles locally in individual components without worrying about name collisions or messing up other parts of the codebase.

CSS modules are not to be confused with mixins, as they serve the opposite purpose. While mixins are components or functions to be reused globally, modules are style sheets with a local scope used in a similar way as styled components in React.

CSS Modules CSS Modules is a pre-processing step: by default, styles are scoped locally to the current component, and the transpiler ensures no conflicts.