css-modules VS vanilla-extract

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.

In our experience, the best testing strategy for modern frontends is a combination of E2E testing (using Playwright+NextJS), and unit testing. Visual regression testing is not worth the effort in our opinion, especially with the advent of better CSS tooling like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract.

For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules

This sounds exactly like Vanilla Extract. https://vanilla-extract.style/

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

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.)

I do a lot of UI work and have never understood the appeal of Tailwind. It’s like relearning a new language. Tailwind was released in 2017. Maybe the CSS landscape wasn’t as good back then? Modern CSS is pretty awesome.

I’ve enjoyed using Vanilla Extract https://vanilla-extract.style/. It’s like css-in-js with none of the downsides as everything gets compiled to css.

Nah, I used enough Tailwind to know it becomes a spaghetti mess. I stick with CSS now, and in React I use https://vanilla-extract.style, compile time CSS in TypeScript.

Vanilla Extract is my current choice for the next greenfield project. I would also recommend checking out how and why this team integrated it with Tailwind.

I'm not trying to call a particular org or library out, because I think the ones I've been digging through (and prompted me to write this) are very high quality. It's vanilla-extract (a build-time CSS-in-JS library) and Braid Design System (built on vanilla-extract).

Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.