styletron VS PostCSS

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.

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.