styled-jsx VS css-modules

You'd rather use this over tailwind? Na...

styled-jsx -> A library with a lot of similar features like styled-components. Has some extra features here and there.

This isn't a new idea. CSS in JS is obviously a thing, but that usually implies having component code with CSS right alongside it in some sort of JS based syntax. There's also JSS which is a library for writing CSS with JS.

The CSS we'll use for the Gantt chart is included in the starter code. We've used Styled JSX, which comes with Next.js, to write scoped-styled components. There are some global styles in styles/globals.js. These global styles are added to our app in the Layout component in the components folder. The entire app is wrapped in this Layout component in the _app.js file, which is in the pages folder.

Styled JSX is what we're using at work right now, since we're using Next.js and it comes with this out of the box. We're actually using both SCSS modules for static styles and Styled JSX for dynamic styles. It's been great so far.

// schema.json { "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/schema", "cli": "nx", "$id": "ReactLibrary", "title": "", "type": "object", "properties": { "name": { "type": "string", "description": "Library name", "$default": { "$source": "argv", "index": 0 }, "x-prompt": "What name would you like to use for the library?", "pattern": "^[a-zA-Z].*$" }, "directory": { "type": "string", "description": "A directory where the lib is placed.", "alias": "dir" }, "domain": { "description": "Domain where this library belongs.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "dom", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which domain this library belongs?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "web", "label": "Web" }, { "value": "common", "label": "Common" } ] } }, "scope": { "type": "string", "description": "A scope for the lib.", "alias": "sc" }, "type": { "description": "Library type", "type": "string", "alias": "t", "x-prompt": { "message": "Select library type?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "data", "label": "Data" }, { "value": "model", "label": "Model" }, { "value": "util", "label": "Util" }, { "value": "feature", "label": "Feature" }, { "value": "ui", "label": "Ui" } ] } }, "style": { "description": "The file extension to be used for style files.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "s", "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 ]" }, { "value": "none", "label": "None" } ] } }, "linter": { "description": "The tool to use for running lint checks.", "type": "string", "enum": ["eslint", "tslint"], "default": "eslint" }, "unitTestRunner": { "type": "string", "enum": ["jest", "none"], "description": "Test runner to use for unit tests.", "default": "jest" }, "skipFormat": { "description": "Skip formatting files.", "type": "boolean", "default": false }, "skipTsConfig": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Do not update `tsconfig.json` for development experience." }, "pascalCaseFiles": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Use pascal case component file name (e.g. `App.tsx`).", "alias": "P", "default": false }, "routing": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate library with routes." }, "appProject": { "type": "string", "description": "The application project to add the library route to.", "alias": "a" }, "publishable": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Create a publishable library." }, "buildable": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Generate a buildable library." }, "importPath": { "type": "string", "description": "The library name used to import it, like `@myorg/my-awesome-lib`." }, "component": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate a default component.", "default": true }, "js": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate JavaScript files rather than TypeScript files.", "default": false }, "globalCss": { "type": "boolean", "description": "When `true`, the stylesheet is generated using global CSS instead of CSS modules (e.g. file is `*.css` rather than `*.module.css`).", "default": false }, "strict": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether to enable tsconfig strict mode or not.", "default": true }, "setParserOptionsProject": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether or not to configure the ESLint `parserOptions.project` option. We do not do this by default for lint performance reasons.", "default": false }, "standaloneConfig": { "description": "Split the project configuration into `/project.json` rather than including it inside `workspace.json`.", "type": "boolean" }, "compiler": { "type": "string", "enum": ["babel", "swc"], "default": "swc", "description": "Which compiler to use." } }, "required": ["name", "type", "scope", "domain"] }

The previous three methods covered the best styling options if you prefer Utility CSS. But perhaps you are more of a CSS-in-JS kind of person. In which case, Styled-JSX might be up your alley.

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.