styletron VS twind

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.

I think TW syntax is great as a CSS shorthand. I think it can be a great tool for making highly descriptive styles in a far more succinct fashion. I think if you you use Twind compiler and you store TW syntax outside of your templates/JSX and you just compile it down to descriptive class names, that's a great use of Tailwind. Then you get the advantage of meaningful names applied to elements in the template, and if you need to refactor/fix a style, then you can find it much easier. It also makes it a lot more dynamic, which standard Tailwind which can be a PITA to make dynamic (e.g. for dynamic behavior in Twind, you can have functions that generate TW style strings and use interpolated strings without having to worry about if the build-time TW compiler understands all the possibilities).

But at least you like something. And I get why people like Tailwind, but I end up finding it constricting for behavior that results in dynamic styles. But I've tried Twind which is a runtime TW compiler and it fixes most of my complaints and it has the same SSR-ability like Stitches & Emotion.

The CSS-in-JS library solves problems of global nature of CSS and of specificity by providing scoping in a unique class-name. It has some cost attached to it i.e run-time which is being solved by order libs vanilla-extract-css. I'm a big fan of tailwind and I honestly believe it is enough for your project. If you also need dynamic styles then CSS-in-JS is better over tailwind, though there are solutions like twind which provide a flavor of tailwind with the CSS-in-JS approach they do have all cons of any CSS-in- JS libraries. I'm very excited about styles by Facebook and waiting for the day it will be open-sourced or CSS itself evolves to me provide scoping and be more modular, until that day comes I'm betting on CSS-in-JS with stitches and vanilla-extract-css.

what framwork are you coming from? i honestly wouldn’t try fresh unless you are using tailwind - bootstrap components are jsx based, and fresh is based off islands architecture which would make integrating the two trickier since youd have to route through deno + the preact compat lib. if you really want to do it, read into this. that being said, tailwind is a very powerful tool. i use it daily in nearly every element on front end, and as someone who likes avoiding design as much as possible ive found tailwind (and twind) are extremely pleasant to work with since it’s mostly class/keyword based styling as opposed to css / sass / scss styling

I want to do something similar with Remix to make a separate stylesheet per route with content coming from a CMS like WordPress. I’ve had my eye on Twind once they add compatibility with v3 and all the JIT stuff. https://twind.dev/

When initializing a new project, Fresh will also ask if you want to use Twind, which is a Tailwind-to-JS library. If you choose this option, then you will have the power of Tailwind without creating a config file or using PostCSS, which I thought is pretty cool.

Try https://twind.dev/