Facebook Open Sources StyleX | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Open Sources StyleX

github.com

27 pointszodvik3 comments

JSX is so good because it's an effective language extension, but CSS-in-JS still feels like a dirty mess, everything just becomes strings in objects, it just takes the elegance of the CSS syntax and throws it out the window.

Like, look at this:

  const styles = stylex.create({
    base: {
      width: {
        default: 800,
        '@media (max-width: 800px)': '100%',
      },
    },
  });

Hmmmm

CSS in JS was such a dumb mistake. This really shouldn’t be a serious consideration in 2023.

Unfortunatelly this is the state of software these days - half-baked libraries + incremental improvements. This doesn't work in most cases. I wouldn't call it mistake though, open sourcing anything is a good thing.

The right solution is a library like this with proper cross-platform abstraction. Then you can simply compile css-in-js to stylesheets to have caching, therefore fully utilizing platforms capabilities.

Who cares whether css is written in css files or js files or whatever. Abstraction + solid tooling (compilation) + ide support is the way.

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