How to style React applications while the world burns around us (2020)

How to style React applications while the world burns around us (2020)(herbcaudill.com)

21 points by HipstaJules 2 years ago | 14 comments

This article is an excellent summary of recent trends and philosophies of CSS. The only new, noteworthy styling solution missed (from what I can tell) is StyleX from Meta.

As someone working in this space, it's a huge relief to move away from piles of CSS/SCSS files towards colocating styles with markup.

beepbooptheory 2 years ago |

Maybe I'm the minority here, but with something like Vite I can import a css file directly into a given component's file and call it a day. Haven't worried about scoping in forever, and only need to manage a number of distinct, small, and comprehensible css files.

uhoh-itsmaciek 2 years ago | |

But they're still separate files. You still have your markup in one place and your CSS in another place, and you need to solve the hardest problem in computer science (naming things) any time you make substantial changes. I think Tailwind has some shortcomings, but I really like that styling and markup live together.

willsmith72 2 years ago | |

Tailwind kills the scoping problem too

I went through a very similar story to the author and ended up with the same conclusion. Once I tried it, everything else felt terrible

junto 2 years ago |

When talking about CSS-in-JS I am reminded of the short lived escapade at Netscape around 1997/1998 when they launched JSSS, only be be shut out by Microsoft ignoring support for it in the increasingly dominant Internet Explorer as they favored CSS. As a result it died and disappeared.

http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-04-1997/swol-04-...

CottonMcKnight 2 years ago | |

I remember JSSS, but a more vivid memory for me is LiveConnect: another Netscape-only project that was incredibly powerful and groundbreaking: it allowed Java and JavaScript code to communicate directly, e.g. plain JS could invoke the JDK and instantiate Java objects. In retrospect, also a truly terrible idea, but at the time, it was amazing.

spencera 2 years ago |

Deserves a (2020) tag I think, given the regular references to "current times", plus the rate of change in the CSS/JS space

HipstaJules 2 years ago | |

This is a good idea, maybe the admins can help us with that?

supermatt 2 years ago |

> There should be a German noun for the fear of breaking something in a CSS codebase.

Webseitenstilzerschütterungsangst?

DougN7 2 years ago | |

Bravo!!! :)

bdcravens 2 years ago |

> Ant Design is a product of Ant Financial, which I gather is the PayPal of the Alibaba universe. It’s very widely used in China.

This feels a bit dismissive. Alipay is the largest payment platform in the world.

danfritz 2 years ago |

I'm a long time material ui user and always disliked the tailwind approach of slapping classnames in a long string.

After reading the excellent article it hit me, I'm already doing the exact same :facepalm:

There is really no difference, instead of a string with classes I have a bunch of props. Time to look at tailwind again...

Mekkanox 2 years ago | |

As a long-time MUI user myself, I had the same "revelation" about Tailwind recently. Before MUI, I worked at a couple startups where we came up with our CSS franken-framework with homegrown utility classes.

It's just easier to do fast proto-typing with various Tailwind classes, and then refactor common sets of HTML tags with tailwind classes, they become reusable React (or Svelte) components.

SPBS 2 years ago |

TL;DR the author settled on Tailwind. I prefer Tachyons myself (less overhead). I agree that functional/atomic CSS is the way to go.

Separation Of Concerns (HTML <-> CSS) is a LIE. Naming is one of the hardest things in computer science, and folks in the "Separation Of Concerns" camp repeatedly subject themselves to this torture by forcing themselves to come up with "semantic" names instead of just writing the damn styles and seeing which styles get repeatedly used together so that they can be condensed into a class.