← Back to context

Comment by weitendorf

9 hours ago

Guys, I found out about this technology called Cascading Style Sheets recently and I think it's the missing piece we've been looking for. It lets you declaratively specify layout in a composable, hierarchical system based on something called the Document Object Model in a way that minimizes both clientside and serverside processing, based on these things called "stylesheets".

The best part is, it's super easy to customize them, read others for inspiration or to see how they did something, or even ship multiple per site to deal with different user preferences. Through this "forms" api, and little-known browser features like url-fragments, target/attribute selector, and style combinators, plus "the checkbox hack" you can build extremely responsive UIs out of it by "cascading" UI updates through your site! When do you think they're going to add it to next.js?

I'm tentatively calling this new UI paradigm "no-framework" or "no package manager", not sure yet https://i.imgur.com/OEMPJA8.png

5 comments

weitendorf

Reply
lmm  4 hours ago

> Cascading Style Sheets recently and I think it's the missing piece we've been looking for. It lets you declaratively specify layout in a composable, hierarchical system based on something called the Document Object Model in a way that minimizes both clientside and serverside processing, based on these things called "stylesheets"

I tried that and it was an absolute nightmare. There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all, and if the DOM hierarchy changes then your styles all change randomly (with, again, no way to tell what changed or where or why). Also "minimizes clientside processing" is a myth, I don't know what the implementation is but it ends up being slower and heavier than normal. Who ever thought this was a good idea?

  • skydhash  4 hours ago

    > There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all

    It's pretty easy. Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply. If you didn't try to be fancy and use weird build tools, you will also get the name of the file and the line number (and maybe navigation to the line itself). In Firefox, there's even a live editor for the selected element and the CSS file.

    > if the DOM hierarchy changes then your styles all change randomly

    Also styles are semantics like:

    - The default appearance of links should be: ...

    - All links in the article section should also be: ...

    - The links inside a blockquote should also be: ...

    - If a link has a class 'popup' it should be: ...

    - The link identified as 'login' should be: ...

    There's a section on MDN about how to ensure those rules are applied in the wanted order[1].

    This way, your styles shouldn't need updates that often unless you change the semantics of your DOM.

    [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Casc...

    • lmm  3 hours ago

      > Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply.

      That tells me which styles apply to an element. You also need the converse - find which elements a given style applies to - and there's no way to do that AFAIK. It's very hard to ever delete even completely unused styles, because there is no way to tell (in the general case) whether a given style is used at all.

      > This way, your styles shouldn't need updates that often unless you change the semantics of your DOM.

      In my experience the DOM doesn't have semantics, or to the extent that it does, they change all the time.

      1 reply →