hyperapp VS css-modules

Please check out https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp

The likely reason it never caught on, is that it has similar pitfalls as Backbone:

- manually attaching DOM elements to view controllers

- manually attaching child views

- models which have to be wired individually via .listenTo

- possibility of infinite loops if the events accidentally recurse

A better tiny alternative would be hyperapp[1] or even Preact, that has a similar bundle size.

[1] https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp

If they're focused on performance and bundle size, it's your chance to try some minimalistic exotic stuff like hyperapp (https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp) or mithril (https://mithril.js.org/) Just for fun

With a bit of a deadline (due to a mixture of procrastination and confidence that Vue would work) I needed something quick. I have also used Hyperapp in the past but that looks like a dead project right now (although arguably it has all the functionality you need so why keep developing it?).

I’m glad it left that impression! My thoughts have clarified a bit since I read that post, and I think what I describe is more declarative, like React. But the best places to read about it (for web devs) are in Elm!

There is also this new thing I found that seems to really lean into the core of what being functional means here: https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp

After a while, you see that basically all systems can be modeled as event-driven, functional systems. It’s a flexible model, and fits beautiful into web dev where the semantics are very clear: the system is the web app and events are clicks, keyboard events, asynchronous calls...

Hyperapp is 1kb.

- Hyperapp (https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp) - Preact - Svelte - React / Vue

I'll tell you what I've learnt from struggling with a bug that made me lose a couple of weeks. The application framework used in this post is Hyperapp, but I guess the same problem can be found in frameworks based on transforming the state of "Single Source of Truth" with pure functions (such as Elm, Redux, so on) if we use them in a wrong way.

Personally, I try my best to avoid bringing in dependencies as much as possible, and try to limit my exposure to only dependencies with low/shallow transitive dependency counts. Unfortunately, this is pretty hard, especially in corporate settings. What we need more of are the opposite of what we've been collectively praising: we need more monolithic packages. Case in point: lodash.template is currently vulnerable with no mitigation, even though lodash itself is not. That's just sloppy publishing practices. Esbuild is a great start over the webpack/babel maze of dependencies. There's a stdlib effort along those lines that hopefully would also help. There's a bunch of micro-frameworks that are used in production just fine and have little to no dependencies.

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.