jsxstyle VS JSS

Works in both React and Preact. It's designed to support generating styles at build time, but I've never bothered. For the sorts of things I work on, being able to quickly bang out a component is more important than golfing the bundle size or maintaining a design system.

jsxstyle feels like I can sculpt in code. It's really satisfying to hammer out some props and see a component come to life, especially when you've got hot module replacement working.

Based on a quick perusal of linked page, Panda seems like perhaps a more mature version of jsxstyle, but also more fidgety. As an army of one, I'm happy to optimize for iteration speed, but if I needed to maintain a system, maybe I'd consider switching to Panda.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsxstyle

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.

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.

Official docs

If you have some experience with React, you probably came across styled-components. In the last few years, the concept of css-in-js became more popular, and there are multiple libraries that are available for us to use. styled-components is one of them, but you can also find Emotion, Radium, JSS, and more. In this post I'm not going to cover the pros and cons of traditional stylesheet files vs. styled-components, and instead - I'm going to focus on tagged template literals - the "magic" that let us use the styled-components syntax.

See for example this one. Sometimes this simple query doesn't work: