JSS VS linaria

Most websites those days are SPA applications that render on the front-side. There is also this trend of CSS in JavaScript also knowns as JSS that is debatable (makes everything overcomplicated), but in some specific cases, can be justified and very useful.

> why tf aren't we using JS for styling already

People are and have been for quite a while

https://cssinjs.org/

JSS

It is possible. At its most simple, you could just modify the style property on every element. That's not generally considered best practice, but there are a number of "CSS-in-JS" libraries which streamline the process. The typically generate dynamic CSS classes and apply them to your elements. A big one is JSS.

import React, { useState, useEffect } from "react"; import Amplify, { API, graphqlOperation } from "aws-amplify"; import { createBlog } from "./graphql/mutations"; import { listBlogs } from "./graphql/queries"; import awsExports from "./aws-exports"; import { ListBlogsQuery } from "./API"; Amplify.configure(awsExports); const initialState = { name: "", body: "" }; const App = () => { const [formState, setFormState] = useState(initialState); const [blogs, setBlogs] = useState(); useEffect(() => { fetchBlogs() }, []); const handleInputChange = (event: React.ChangeEvent) => { setFormState({ ...formState, [event.target.name]: event.target.value }); }; const fetchBlogs = async () => { try { const blogData = (await API.graphql(graphqlOperation(listBlogs))) as { data: ListBlogsQuery } setBlogs(blogData.data); } catch (err) { console.log("Error fetching blogs" + err); } }; const addBlog = async () => { try { if (!formState.name || !formState.body) return; const blog = { ...formState }; if (blogs) { await API.graphql(graphqlOperation(createBlog, { input: blog })); await fetchBlogs(); setFormState(initialState); } } catch (err) { console.log("error creating blog: ", err); } }; return (

Amplify Todos

Create Blog {blogs && blogs?.listBlogs?.items?.map((blog, index) => { return (

{blog?.name}

{blog?.body}

); })}

); }; const styles = { container: { width: 400, margin: "0 auto", display: "flex", //real weird issue: https://github.com/cssinjs/jss/issues/1344 flexDirection: "column" as "column", justifyContent: "center", padding: 20, }, todo: { marginBottom: 15 }, input: { border: "none", backgroundColor: "#ddd", marginBottom: 10, padding: 8, fontSize: 18, }, todoName: { fontSize: 20, fontWeight: "bold" }, todoDescription: { marginBottom: 0 }, button: { backgroundColor: "black", color: "white", outline: "none", fontSize: 18, padding: "12px 0px", }, }; export default App;

Material UI v5 brought some amazing updates, but switching from JSS to Emotion had an arguably nasty side-effect: it was no longer as straightforward to group your component styles in classes. Fortunately, a fantastic library emerged that allowed developers to not only reduce the extreme pain from migrating all their classes from v4's makeStyles to emotion, but to also to continue to writing classes in practically the same syntax, with wonderful TS type-safety. This library was tss-react, and it was one of my favorite open source discoveries of 2021.

I started writing a long response, but I want to add that a simple CRA + JSS + TS (named exports only) stack solves or abstracts away most of these issues.

JSS

The code duplication occurred due to disabling the default code splitting algorithm in Next.js. Previous developers used this approach to make Linaria work, which is designed to improve productivity. However, disabling code splitting led to a decrease in performance.

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

I like Linaria [0] because your IDE typechecks your styles and gives you autocomplete/intellisense when typing styles. With Tailwind you have to look everything up in docs because it's all strings, not importable constants. Leads to a lot of bugs from typos that aren't a thing with type checked styles.

[0] https://github.com/callstack/linaria

And if you're wondering why I'm not using something like Linaria or some other runtime-less CSS-in-JS tool, it's simply because I don't want to have to spend my time setting things up and working around stuff and all that jazz. I just want something that works, and I've already got a personal scaffold for getting SC to work out of the box with Next, so, right now, it's either that or sticking to CSS/SCSS/SASS. For me, that is. I know it's such a small thing, but, honestly, one less headache for me is 2 steps forward.

I know that there are solutions that generate static css files (like vanilla-extract or linaria), but neither of them work with app router currently (1, 2).

If you really want tighter interaction with JS, try a zero-runtine solution like linaria

https://github.com/callstack/linaria is objectively the best. It's 100% styled component compatible, but with zero runtime which not only makes it substantially faster, but also makes it easy to do things like server side rendering, etc.

tags inside SFCs are typically injected as native </code> tags during development to support hot updates. <strong>For production they can be extracted and merged into a single CSS file.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>There are also 3rd party CSS libs that do the same thing such as <a href="https://linaria.dev/">linaria</a>, <a href="https://vanilla-extract.style/">vanilla-extract</a>, and <a href="https://compiledcssinjs.com/">compiled CSS</a>. Which can be used in the event you're stuck with something that doesn't have baked in support via SFC formats (looking at you React).</p> <p>These are my preferred ways of handing it.</p> <ol> <li>Tailwind</li> </ol> <p>Option 2 is tailwind, which works backwards.</p> <p>That is, instead of the above with extraction where you write the styles, and the framework or libs extract them and replace them with class names, it's the other way around.</p> <p>You're writing class names first (which are essentially aggregated CSS property-values) which then generate and/or reference styles.</p> <p>It has the advantage of being easy to write (assuming you've got editor LSP, linting, etc), but as you've discovered, it's difficult to read / can get really messy really fast.</p> <p>As far as all the other claims on the Tailwind site, it's all marketing, at least 80% bullshit.</p> </div>