styled-components VS PostCSS

In general I recommend using styled-components or emotion. These directly attach CSS to your components in a scoped way so that your CSS files aren’t stepping on each other’s toes all the time and make sure styling is colocated with the component.

Not only that - after React got more popular - we started to place CSS in components as well (CSS-in-JS like this):

There are different ways to implement CSS In JS, most commonly using either framework-dependent or framework-agnostic libraries. Styled components are among the most popular of them with over 30,000+ stars on GitHub.

Since the main focus is to develop a library in accordance with the principles of accessibility, Cactus UI was developed in a way that without adopting a special design language only includes the necessary styling of components for proper work. However, the developer can easily style it according to the design she/he needs. Also, the developer can use it with different libraries (styled-components etc.) or can style all components according to she/he design with the help of css.

With Next.js, you have complete control over the design of your site. It uses Styled Components for styling, which allows you to write actual CSS code within your JavaScript files. This means you can easily customize the appearance of your blog without having to navigate between multiple files.

See https://observatory.mozilla.org and https://github.com/styled-components/styled-components/issues/2363 and https://content-security-policy.com/examples/allow-inline-style/

Simply said, Styled Components is a third-party library that lets you design reusable custom HTML components with predefined CSS properties and use them anywhere you choose inside your project.

UI, CSS : tailwindcss + PostCSS + Radix UI + UI components by shadcn

Actually, Vite doesn’t support Browserslist at all: the only reason it “seems” to work well with CSS is because Vite uses PostCSS, which itself natively uses Browserslist. We could say that Vite supports Browserslist by proxy, for CSS.

postCSS

We will be using PostCSS to process our source files' CSS.

But... this is still hacky! Can we do better? Yes, we can, using PostCSS to transform @when rules to the css we have seen above. I could not find any PostCSS plugin for this, so I created one that is really quick and dirty, but works for this simple use case. You can find it here.

Tooling takes away alot of headaches and saves yourself from "being clever" (stupid). Most front-end tooling can be run out of the nodeJS runtime, so even if your stack isn't JS oriented, it's still worth running node. The obvious shoutouts: Vite, eslint, stylelint, postCSS, browserslist. Playwright is somethin else you can give a look at if your scope of work is large enough.

As we write more features we would need to organize our css files, write additional styles or wrap any tailwind components up using tailwinds @apply helper. Currently, we can’t import other css files into the main application.tailwind.css file because our node-powered TailwindCSS is provided by cssbundling-rails, which by default doesn’t allow it. Luckily we can fix it, thanks to postcss.

First, we need to install postcss and other plugins via yarn. From terminal:

Of course, we have great tooling for that: Autoprefixer, PostCSS and Stylelint for CSS transformation, Babel and Webpack for JavaScript transpilation and bundling, ESLint for code analysis, and many others.