postcss-extend-rule VS styled-components

Closer to possible future standards, the PostCSS Extend Rule lets you use the @extend at-rule and functional selectors in CSS, following the speculative CSS Extend Rules Specification.

When styled-components hit the CSS scene, it caught many developers' eyes with its core concept: component-level styling. With this approach, your styles are defined directly within your React components using template literals and tagged functions. It’s a straightforward technique that keeps styles tightly coupled with their corresponding components, making your code easier to find, understand, and modify.

The SPA version heavily utilizes Styled Components, and although it's feasible to use the styled-vanilla-extract library and migrate the code with minimal changes, some parts would still need refactoring since CSS is pre-built during compilation. We've previously used the useStylesScoped$ function while building a corporate website, but it often felt more like a hack than a solid solution.

Hey, I’m not an expert on every single JavaScript styling library, so take this as you will. The bulk of my experience is with Styled Components. It is an excellent tool popular with most of the works I've done.

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.