cssnano VS classnames

There are a number of tools available to minify CSS in development or as part of your build pipeline including, but not limited to, cssnano and Vite. If you’re using sass, it’s as straightforward as adding --style=compressed to your sass command. The results you achieve may vary depending on the complexity of your CSS, but you may see numbers similar to this (processed with sass):

Since Tailwind is a PostCSS plugin, we can also add cssnano plugin to compress the bundle.

Minifying your CSS involves removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and reducing property names. This results in smaller file sizes and faster downloads. Use tools like UglifyCSS and CSSNano for this purpose.

For the sake of simplicity, my example setup uses a single-file plugin and puts all styles directly into a single style.css file without using further theme.css or theme.json files, which we might want to use depending on the requirements for customizability. Likewise, SASS / SCSS support can be added if it makes life easier for the developer(s) involved. But as we already use PostCSS to control autoprefixing and cssnano minification, we can also use it to support the latest and even upcoming CSS sytax like native CSS nesting.

The cssnano plugin can minify/compress CSS and make it suitable for production use. Install cssnano plugin using this command:

CSS minification by cssnano

cssnano

cssnano is used to ensure that the final result is as small as possible for a production environment.

There are plenty of free plugins are available to optimize styles, scripts and create source maps for them. Optimize styles Optimize Scripts Create Sourcemaps

The component needs the classname dependency and a search icon which I referenced to work. So install the classname package and download the search icon below.

classnames: Makes dynamic CSS class application a breeze. Learn more

But of course, it is a button, so it could have multiple variants: primary and secondary(you can increase the number of customizable params, but we will limit it to 1, variant). To implement this you can use any library for combining classnames, for example, classnames, clsx. Let’s use the classic one, "classnames".

Use classnames and you can comma delimited your class names where needed.

To get started with our image modal implementation, i'll assume you already have a React project set up. For UI i’m using Tailwind CSS. But you can use any UI library as your wish. For the image cropping and rotating functionality, we'll be utilizing the react-easy-crop library. This library provides a simple and intuitive way to crop and interact with images and videos within a React component. We will also use the heroicons and classnames libraries in our tutorial. To install all the libraries and their dependencies, open your terminal and navigate to your project's directory. Run the following command:

Save yourself some headache and use https://github.com/JedWatson/classnames

There is an NPM module called classnames that makes this a bit easier: https://www.npmjs.com/package/classnames

To use the global Tailwind types from styles/cssClasses.d.ts, I've leveraged a lot of work from this post, so credit goes there for a lot of the complex TypeScript wizardry that makes things work. In essence, it builds upon the classnames (or clsx) to provide a helper function that gives us with the type safety we're after. This cleverness means we get type checking that works with whitespace, multiple classes (e.g., "container p-5")and arbitrary values (e.g., "border-[5px]"). The input "container p-5 invalid-class" provides the nifty error message:

but I wouldn't recommend it, because I think the point of using tailwind is to not having to abstract class into component based style. it even better to write tailwind classes into the html directly and to use tailwind-fun sparingly and only if you needed to add logic to your classes. tailwind-fun purpose is more like of https://www.npmjs.com/package/classnames rather than any other css library

Use the classnames library, that way I can group the utility classes together (one line) and break them up into multiple lines, and additionally have some of them be conditional based on variables/parameters;