goldstack VS css-modules

Infrastructure Complexity: Serverless computing emerged as a simplified approach to application development, but the infrastructure it requires can be unexpectedly complex. Tasks like setting up an API gateway with Lambdas can result in extensive configuration, increasing brittleness and the learning curve for developers.

I completed the upgrade and released this in version 0.5.0 of Goldstack.

If you have any question or comments, please reach out or raise an issue 🤗.

Thus, I started the process of developing a server-side rendering friendly template a few months ago. I released this template a while ago and have since also completed the implementation of the new version of my blog. This post contains my experiences and learnings from this process.

For any suggestions, ideas and comments, please be welcome to head to GitHub and create an issue 🤗.

See a full source code example here: lambdaCompression.ts

The above template and boilerplate are regularly updated and automatically tested (project install & standing up infrastructure). If you nonetheless encounter any problems, please raise an issue on GitHub.

Consider helping out making this template better for others by raising an issue in GitHub if you encounter any problems or have questions or ideas.

The above assumes that there is a local .aws/config and/or .aws/credentials file present. Note that the AWS credentials in awsUser can be initialised in many different ways, see the file awsUserUtils.ts for reference or the AWS documentation on Setting SDK Credentials in Node.js.

If you have any comments or ideas for this template, please head over to the Goldstack GitHub project and raise an issue.

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.