snowpack VS PostCSS

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

Additional features for Bun include a transpiler and package manager. As hinted at in the name, it also includes bundling features, giving you the functionality that would otherwise require another tool, such as Snowpack or rollup.js. It also has a dead code elimination feature through its JavaScript minifier.

Even, there are several bundling tools available, including popular ones like Webpack and Snowpack.

once upon a time there was this thing called Snowpack: https://www.snowpack.devwhich had a lot of promises as vite (rollup w/ esm). So I migrated a project over from CRA to this thing.While startup speed was much much faster, it actually didn't make the app useable. I timed it meticulously for both CRA and snowpack build and found that the TTI was almost identical. I am not claiming the same to be vite but it's possible and I don't have a large app to prove it..

Snowpack.

> special snowflake build toolchains

That reminds me, wasn't there a build tool called Snowflake?

Oh, it was called Snowpack [1]. And it's no longer being actively maintained. Yeesh.

[1]: https://www.snowpack.dev/

Snowpack app - a single HTML page with Snowpack configuration

The first thing we need is a JavaScript project for our app. We'll use Snowpack as our bundler. Open a terminal located in a directory for the project and type npx create-snowpack-app react-couchdb --template @snowpack/app-template-minimal. Snowpack will create a skeleton for our React application and install all dependencies. Once it's done doing its job, type cd react-couchdb to get into the newly created project directory. create-snowpack-app is very similar to create-react-app in how it sets-up your project, but it's a lot less intrusive (You don't even need to use eject at any point).

Snowpack appears to be no longer maintained.

Before you get too deep into Snowpack, be aware that they recommend using other tools now because it’s no longer maintained.

the plugins in the official PostCSS website were old like IE6 or the marquee tag, and

Hello internet. I just published a new blog post on how to implement dark mode with SvelteKit, optionally with PostCSS and TailwindCSS:

There are many frontend tools available for this purpose. For example, PostCSS is a popular CSS processor that can combine and minimize your code. With the right plugin, it can even fix your code for compatibility issues, making sure your CSS styles work for all browsers.

I use PostCSS to extend CSS’s features and to add a few things that make writing styles a little more convenient, but it could easily be swapped for another preprocessor like Sass or vanilla CSS. It’s up to you. You can view my PostCSS config here.

Code transpilation isn't specific to JavaScript, You can also add a level of transformation to your CSS source using tools like post-css. Most languages with a fairly mature ecosystem will probably have some tools to help with code transformation.

In large projects, it is still a good idea to use PostCSS, which will translate new CSS features to something that browsers understand today.

LiveCodes provides many of the commonly used developer tools. These include Monaco editor (that powers VS Code), Prettier, Emmet, Vim/Emacs modes, Babel, TypeScript, SCSS, Less, PostCSS, Jest and Testing Library, among others. All these tools run seamlessly in the browser without any installations or configurations. It feels like a very light-weight version of your own local development environment including the keyboard shortcuts, IntelliSense and code navigation features.

Usually, one of the first things I do on creating a new web app is to throw a UI library in to help style components. There are several UI libraries that can be used by Svelte, but in this case I went with daisyUI because it's a fairly popular UI library which includes tailwind. To install daisyUI, you first need to install tailwind. There's a few different ways to do this (such as this guide), but the easiest way I've found is the following command, which also adds PostCSS and AutoPrefixer:

Vanilla CSS has taken a similar path with ambitious working drafts, better browser support, and PostCSS to fill the gap for user agents lagging behind. So why is Sass/SCSS still so popular? Maybe we go so used to it that we might have forgotten what problems it was meant to solve in the first place.