engine VS vanilla-extract

It's not, but I appreciate you sharing this anyway – thank you!

I was referring mostly to GSS: https://gss.github.io/

I think it was an interesting idea that unfortunately didn't really work out. This was before both flex and grid layouts were a thing, so anything new in this space was exciting really. It's a much better css layout world today than it was 8-10 years ago, and particularly grid layout is a very welcome change, but I can't help but think some great ideas have been left by the wayside. Maybe for good reasons, but still.

I'd love to see something like constraint layouts in pure CSS. It's an incredibly powerful tool when building user interfaces.

I was really excited to see GSS (http://gss.github.io), however at the time it was far too slow to be usable in real projects.

It's been a while since I messed with it. IIRC, the way it satisfies the constraints tends to support some really complex adaptive sizing behaviors once you learn to anticipate it. But I never ended up using it seriously, because flex is usually (and possibly always) good enough, and I don't think the web port https://github.com/gss/engine ever saw much adoption. Not completely sure they offered a way of talking about lists of child elements.

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/.