At first I though this is for those situations where you find yourself urged to modify the css in your javascript. But looking at the documentation, this seems to be a way to write the complete CSS in JS, and then to have it compiled into CSS. Do I understand that wrong? If not: Why would one want that?
The main goal with writing styles in JavaScript is to make CSS work in the context of component-based systems. The language is magnificent, but it was made in an age where the web consisted of documents.
These days we're building rich, interactive, client-side user interfaces with the same language, but it's standing in our way. That's why there has been a lot of exploration, especially in the React ecosystem, around putting styles in JavaScript.
I'd encourage you to take a look at these magnificent resources which I cannot do justice in a single comment:
- The talk that kicked it all off: "CSS in JS" by vjeux[0] (made React Native, works at Facebook)
- "Rendering Khan Academys Learn Menu Whereever I Please" [1]
- "Scale FUD and style components" [2]
and a bunch of other talks and articles if you google "CSS in JS".
[0]: https://speakerdeck.com/vjeux/react-css-in-js [1]: https://medium.com/@jdan/rendering-khan-academys-learn-menu-... [2]: https://medium.learnreact.com/scale-fud-and-style-components...
Maybe add a "How to use this" section describing possible workflows to the Readme?
Also I run into situations where my js produces inline css, and a lodash style lib for that could be useful. Thanks for the answer, congratz for launching!
Definitely will work on improving the README, just needed to finally get this out of the door ;)
Cheers!
That isn't what this is although I also had to poke around the source code to figure out what it is exactly.
It's a set of mixins and utility functions that return a js object that is then used as input for either inline styles, or for one of the may CSS in JS libraries that convert do a JS object to CSS.
As for how useful? Well, the color utilities seem to replicate what color.js does, so nothing new there. The mixins seem to be mostly about prefixing, and you're going to need to prefix the rest of your CSS-in-JS anyway - for which there are various standalone libraries, and plugins to the aforementioned libraries.
The shorthands let you do things like:
borderWidth('12px', '24px', '36px', '48px')
=>
{ 'border-top-width': '12px', 'border-right-width': '24px', 'border-bottom-width': '36px', 'border-left-width': '48px' }
Thing is, I can already do that without the expansion:
{ 'borderWidth': '12px 24px 36px 48px' }
As much as I respect the guys behind this, I'd question how useful it is overall.
Basically, there is lots of styles in JavaScript libraries floating around, especially in the React ecosystem. The issue is that many people need Sass utility functions and mixins like lighten/darken/clearfix to be productive with their styling, and no real comprehensive "Compass for styles in JavaScript" exists—so this is it.
We looked at a lot of existing JavaScript color libraries, but most of them have some sort of fluent API that is very different from the way CSS preprocessors handle these functions. This confuses people and makes the API hard to learn, so we decided to build our own that mimics the Sass API as closely as possible. (apart from being all curried functions that are composeable, which means switching some argument orders around)
I did look at the docs, but that doesn't have an explanation of what value this is trying to offer either.
If designers are being asked to write CSS-IN-JS, I can get where there the difficulty comes from, but I'd still argue that most of these functions are just moving the chairs around.
This [1] IMHO is the defacto JS color lib, but again can see how, if the only thing you know is SASS, it looks a bit to much like real code.