styled-components VS emotion

As already mentioned in the previous section, a certain flavor of functional programming can be quite elegant in JavaScript. The simplicity of the object model makes it very convenient to organize and operate on data. Dynamic typing and type coercion allows you to take certain shortcuts (unless you are trying to sort a list of numbers...). Use the strengths of whatever language you are using to your advantage. It is good to push the boundaries of the language to create new things. For example, styled components and GraphQL have normalized the use of tagged template literals for domain specific languages (DSLs). But in general, you'll have a much better time working with the grain of the language than against it.

I want to be clear that I am far from a TailwindCSS hater. I think the framework is awesome and I am looking forward to its future in the space. I definitely feel like I need more time with it and more experience working with it, but right now I'm more excited about Styled Components (which I've taken a love to from Josh W. Comeau's CSS for JavaScript Developers Course) and also Vanilla Extract which I plan to look into more for future projects. With other tools like Chakra UI also looming over my shoulder competing for my headspace with styling, these small frustrations from Tailwind keep adding up and I'm not sure if I'll be using it for my own personal projects anymore.

You could checkout styled-components which allows you to make components and add css to them in javascript. With this, you can create variants, and wherever you need a specific variant, just create a prop called variant, and pass in which specific style of component you need. Note you do need the babel-plugin-styled-components for it to work in nextjs

Yo it dis style components (and they rock)

Let's face the fact that this calculation is not straightforward and hard to read, even when you are familiar with the technique. Luckily for us, we can extract SASS mixins, or utility functions for various CSS-in-JS libraries (like styled-components).

styled-components for styling needs

This article aims to explain how we could use react-hot-toast and styled-components to create some beautiful-looking toast messages 😉

No, you're right about using @use and @forward rather than @import. These days I generally work with CSS in JS using something like styled-components, but when I do work on static sites, I funnily enough do use a rather nice gulp build I've put together over the years, that leverages browserstack and pug, so @import works for me... but I should really update my boilerplate.

I'm using React for making the UI element dynamic so that we can easily change the status of a step from pending to complete. Also using the emotion library for writing css styles with JavaScript because it's efficient and fun! We can achieve the same result using CSS (SCSS, SASS).

The default style library used for generating CSS styles for MUI components is emotion.

Emotion

That sent me on a lengthy wild goose chase. Stack Overflow had one question with no accepted answer. Babel was the primary suspect so I tried reordering all my presets and then upgrading to the latest version. I poked around in the Webpack config. The Emotion repo’s issues page wasn’t any help. I tried completely switching up our Emotion implementation but that created a whole new set of problems.

My site uses Chakra UI for theming, which uses Emotion -- a CSS-in-JS library -- under the hood. Emotion will happily render tons of tags when statically generating HTML from your React components. For most use cases where you render React on the server (statically or not), this is desirable. In the case of RSS/Atom feeds, this is pretty useless.

Solution

The solution here is to strip all the and tags from the generated HTML. Rather than summoning The One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane by trying to use regex here, I found this library to help me with this task:

const cleanHtmlContent = stripHtml(htmlContent, {
    onlyStripTags: ['script', 'style'],
    stripTogetherWithTheirContents: ['script', 'style'],
}).result;

Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The end result

I now have serve RSS, Atom and a JSON Feed for your reading pleasure. Most of the relevant code can be found here

Future plans

At some point I want to diversify my writing output by not only writing about tech. And even within the topic of tech there are many sub-topics I could write about, not all of which are equally interesting to every reader (all 5 of them, including my mom 👩‍👦). I'm planning to introduce tags to allow filtering content once I have enough of it.

Once I have tags, I would like to start supporting dynamic feeds so readers can subscribe only to the stuff they actually want to read. I imagine building an endpoint like this:

/feeds/by-tags.xml?tags=tag1,tag2

Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I'm curious if others are doing this!

This was the biggest chunk of work for us. We've gone through a styling change before with Material-UI when they moved from inline styles to JSS, but this time Material-UI 5 moves away from JSS as the default styling solution to emotion. We've been relying heavily on JSS for the majority of our components, so lots of them looked something like this...

"style": { "description": "The file extension to be used for style files.", "type": "string", "alias": "s", "default": "css", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which stylesheet format would you like to use?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "css", "label": "CSS" }, { "value": "scss", "label": "SASS(.scss) [ http://sass-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "styl", "label": "Stylus(.styl) [ http://stylus-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "less", "label": "LESS [ http://lesscss.org ]" }, { "value": "styled-components", "label": "styled-components [ https://styled-components.com ]" }, { "value": "@emotion/styled", "label": "emotion [ https://emotion.sh ]" }, { "value": "styled-jsx", "label": "styled-jsx [ https://www.npmjs.com/package/styled-jsx ]" } ] } }, ...

Mantine no longer depends on react-jss, we’ve migrated everything to emotion – based on our internal tests styles management became ~ 40% more performant and contribute ~15% less to bundle size (see comment if you want to find out more)

Ahh, I see. Yeah, I'm using emotion for styling so saying something like: