styletron VS JSS

React is pretty much its own language at this point. With J/TSX. Not even CSS is immune to react's approach of "what everything was proprammatically generated divs?", case and point https://www.styletron.org

Some technical thoughts as someone who could care less about fanboyism:

- One point where atomic CSS frameworks are supposed to shine over conventional CSS is bundle size, since they (at least the good ones) compile to only a single rule for any used value, rather than potentially repeating rules for semantically different classes.

- Another point where atomic CSS frameworks shine is just sheer volume of banging code out. When the bulk of your output is visual, mastering tools based on shorthands like tailwind, emmet, etc can feel very productive.

- Purely atomic CSS frameworks can make some workflows more difficult, e.g. by having too granular call sites and not allowing "let's see what happens to the overall theme if I do this design change" iterative style of work, or because workflows that edit CSS on the fly via browser devtools can no longer be used to limit impact within semantic lines (e.g. "I want to change padding only on buttons, without breaking everything else that happens to depend on the same padding value"). There are both design-oriented and debugging-oriented workflows that are affected in similar ways.

- You generally don't get visual regressions at a distance w/ atomic CSS. This matters at organizations where desire for pixel precision and simultaneously fickle design teams are the norm. But conversely, "can we just change the font size to be a bit bigger across the site" can often run into issues of missed spots. On a similar note, designs may become inconsistent across a site over time due to the hyper local nature of atomic CSS oriented development.

- Custom rules may as well be written in APL[0]; they usually aren't documented and it takes a "you-gotta-know-them-to-know-them" sort of familiarity to be able to work with them (or get back to them after a while).

- There are some tools that mix and match atomic CSS with other paradigms. For example, styletron[0] can output atomic CSS for the bundling benefits, but looks like React styled components from a devexp perspective, and has rendering modes that output traditional-looking debug classes for chrome devtool oriented workflows.

The main theme to be aware of: proponents rarely talk of maintenance, so beware of honeymoon effect. Detractors often omit that traditional CSS (especially at scale) also requires a lot of diligence to maintain. So think about maintenance and how AOP[1] vs hyperlocal development workflows interact with your organization's design culture.

[0] https://www.styletron.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming

It is created, managed, and utilized by Uber. It includes a wide range of attractive components, with accessibility as the top focus. It is quick since it is built with the Styletron engine. Style overrides can be used to tweak themes, but in my experience, I've never required them because the design vibe they're trying for is precisely what I want.

[0] https://www.styletron.org/ [1] https://baseweb.design/blog/getting-started-with-styletron#getting-started-with-styletron

When we created the library, we were using styletron for our styles, and we wanted to bind the breakpoints we defined in @blocz/react-responsive with the breakpoints used for our styles.

Most websites those days are SPA applications that render on the front-side. There is also this trend of CSS in JavaScript also knowns as JSS that is debatable (makes everything overcomplicated), but in some specific cases, can be justified and very useful.

> why tf aren't we using JS for styling already

People are and have been for quite a while

https://cssinjs.org/

JSS

It is possible. At its most simple, you could just modify the style property on every element. That's not generally considered best practice, but there are a number of "CSS-in-JS" libraries which streamline the process. The typically generate dynamic CSS classes and apply them to your elements. A big one is JSS.

import React, { useState, useEffect } from "react"; import Amplify, { API, graphqlOperation } from "aws-amplify"; import { createBlog } from "./graphql/mutations"; import { listBlogs } from "./graphql/queries"; import awsExports from "./aws-exports"; import { ListBlogsQuery } from "./API"; Amplify.configure(awsExports); const initialState = { name: "", body: "" }; const App = () => { const [formState, setFormState] = useState(initialState); const [blogs, setBlogs] = useState(); useEffect(() => { fetchBlogs() }, []); const handleInputChange = (event: React.ChangeEvent) => { setFormState({ ...formState, [event.target.name]: event.target.value }); }; const fetchBlogs = async () => { try { const blogData = (await API.graphql(graphqlOperation(listBlogs))) as { data: ListBlogsQuery } setBlogs(blogData.data); } catch (err) { console.log("Error fetching blogs" + err); } }; const addBlog = async () => { try { if (!formState.name || !formState.body) return; const blog = { ...formState }; if (blogs) { await API.graphql(graphqlOperation(createBlog, { input: blog })); await fetchBlogs(); setFormState(initialState); } } catch (err) { console.log("error creating blog: ", err); } }; return (

Amplify Todos

Create Blog {blogs && blogs?.listBlogs?.items?.map((blog, index) => { return (

{blog?.name}

{blog?.body}

); })}

); }; const styles = { container: { width: 400, margin: "0 auto", display: "flex", //real weird issue: https://github.com/cssinjs/jss/issues/1344 flexDirection: "column" as "column", justifyContent: "center", padding: 20, }, todo: { marginBottom: 15 }, input: { border: "none", backgroundColor: "#ddd", marginBottom: 10, padding: 8, fontSize: 18, }, todoName: { fontSize: 20, fontWeight: "bold" }, todoDescription: { marginBottom: 0 }, button: { backgroundColor: "black", color: "white", outline: "none", fontSize: 18, padding: "12px 0px", }, }; export default App;

Material UI v5 brought some amazing updates, but switching from JSS to Emotion had an arguably nasty side-effect: it was no longer as straightforward to group your component styles in classes. Fortunately, a fantastic library emerged that allowed developers to not only reduce the extreme pain from migrating all their classes from v4's makeStyles to emotion, but to also to continue to writing classes in practically the same syntax, with wonderful TS type-safety. This library was tss-react, and it was one of my favorite open source discoveries of 2021.

I started writing a long response, but I want to add that a simple CRA + JSS + TS (named exports only) stack solves or abstracts away most of these issues.

JSS