postcss-plugins VS css-modules

the author of the most popular PostCSS plugin himself recommended the postcss-preset-env over his own creation which is cssnex, and

The example in A) won't work as the plugin can't convert the functions with variables in it. https://github.com/csstools/postcss-plugins/tree/main/plugin...

You can use this today if you're using PostCSS in your build process (which is the case if you use autoprefixer)! https://preset-env.cssdb.org/

Switching from a ready-made tool like Sass or a recommendation package like cssnext (deprecated since 2019) or PostCSS Preset Env (archived in 2022), to the modular PostCSS Preset Env plugin set we can choose a helpful and convenient set of future CSS features beyond the current stable client CSS.

To implement :has support, the css-has-pseudo polyfill can be used. This polyfill includes both a PostCSS plugin and a JS function to be used in the HTML page.

Yes, it's behind a flag and only in future versions, but it is a huge step forward. Those versions will soon be available, and we can try it locally (unfortunately, not on production without a polyfill or a plugin).

w/ postcss-preset-env(v7.8.3): convert modern CSS into something most browsers can understand, determining the polyfills you need based on your targeted browsers or runtime environments. It takes the support data that comes from MDN and Can I Use and determine from a browserlist whether those transformations are needed. It also packs Autoprefixer within and shares the list with it, so prefixes are only applied when you're going to need them given your browser support list.

There's a @ custom-media proposal (and PostCSS plugin) that can make it a lot easier to use media queries across components. Define your MQs in your global CSS, use everywhere. If you're worried about repeating MQs in your CSS from a bloat perspective, there are PostCSS plugins for that as well.

The term you are looking for is "nesting". CSS currently does not support it. But there is a draft being worked on. No browser currently supports it, though. Most CSS Pre- or Postprocessors like Sass, Less, Stylus, PostCSS support nesting.

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.